Okay, so Wednesday morning, we ate a traditional Japanese breakfast in the hotel restaurant. It was rad, and I didn’t take any pics… but I will! Broiled miso saba with tamago-yaki, shiro miso no dofu, takuan-zuke, okara, dashi braised turnip with ground chicken(yum!),sake-lees tsukemono, tiny baby sardines, rice and green tea… my god it was awesome, and just 1150 yen!
Next, we went through a fairly simple procedure at the post office withdrawing money, and hopped on the subway this time, riding it down to Ginza. Ginza is so different from Akihabara… very high-end, classy and a bit “too cool for school” for my tastes. There was a cute plushie store, which was fairly inexpensive, but none of us bought anything. Ginza has amazing architecture, a rad skybridge, a huge kabuki theater, a park where we saw Japanese apricots, and some awesome sticker tags. We saw a bunch of older women in kimonos, but it’s weird to ask to take someone’s picture, so we didn’t.
Our feet were tired and we were starving, so we hopped back on the subway and rode it to Kanda. After wandering around back alleys and past some cool music stores (guitars and violins and cellos…), we made it back to Akihabara and sat down to the best ramen I’ve ever had! I had the kimchee ramen, Sandy had the wakame ramen and gyoza, and Mike had chicken ramen. They didn’t have green tea (!!) but they kept the cold water coming. It’s very warm here, and humid, but with enough intermittent breezes and rainstorms that it stays pleasant for the most part. Oh, we did buy cute umbrellas in Ginza, I forgot that part (EVERYONE uses umbrellas, even riding their bikes…).
Now it was time to spend money. I have pics of a bunch of stuff we bought, but I’ll save bandwidth and just say those 200 yen gashapon machines are more addictive than pachinko. We took our pictures with the colonel, passed a cool little shrine (it was closed for the evening…) and stumbled upon a little European coffee shop where we proceeded to have awesome coffee. The guy running the place brewed the coffee in round glass science lab flasks under Bunsen burners! It was a sight to behold, served with tiny pots of cream.
We dropped our loot off at the hotel and headed back out for food. Walked to a yakitori joint, but it was more of a bar, so we kept looking. We found a burger place called “Freshness Burger”, but seeing the packed restaurant to the right of it, and seeing how it had NO people in it, we decided to keep walking. Eventually we settled on street vendor takoyaki! We sat on a bench and ate a ton of yummy takoyaki for really cheap. Then, we traversed a huge (vertical…everything is built up here) shopping center called Don Quixote, where we bought some more cute stuff. We were tired by that time, so back to the hotel we went. I had an Ume wine? Beer? I don’t know, but it was very good. It was time once again to sleep, where I dreamed of gashapon machines.
Bunny toy I bought - the upliftingly titled “Deeppresso” - more street art - we found this guy in Ginza
