Monday, January 16, 2012

Tokyo Day 1 - Friday, January 13

We slept in the next day until 11:00 (10:00 shanghai time) and then tried to do some sightseeing. Our hotel was in Asakusa which for some unknown reason I kept accidentally calling Osaka, oops... We started off by walking 15 minutes towards the Asakusa Shrine. On the way we stopped in a tourist info center which told us the location of a vegetarian restaurant and about a free tour of Ueno that we could take. We tried to find out how to say vegetarian in Japanese but I don't think there is a word for it and they told us to just say vegetarian. The area around the shrine is really cute, there are tons of little shops selling food and little knick knacks for tourist.












We located the restaurant they mentioned thanks to Danny's amazing sense of direction and ability to read Chinese characters but quickly discovered it was not vegetarian at all and had nothing I could eat on the menu. We ended up going to a little ramen shop nearby for lunch. I got vegetable tempura which was pretty good and Danny got udon noodles with some sort of beef (*DANNY EDIT* chicken). The waitress was very nice, spoke excellent English and gave me a free rice ball to make up for not having shrimp with the tempura. After I bit into it I discovered there was Salmon in the middle and she replaced it with a seaweed filled one. People in Japan very rarely seem to think vegetarian means no fish, even when you say it specifically. I didn't actually end up eating fish so I tried not to think about it.












The meal was fairly cheap, only about 10 US dollars for Danny's and $12 for mine. As we finished up we debated if we were supposed to tip since we had neglected to look it up previous to arriving. In China you don't tip anywhere. One time Danny told the delivery guy to keep the change an extra 10 kuai ($1.50) and he was extremely happy, but usually they get confused and think you paid too much by mistake. We decided to just try tipping anyway and see how it went. The waitress chased after us and said we paid too much. So no tipping in Japan...













Afterwards we checked out Asakusa Shrine. They have these areas where you are supposed to make a wish and draw straws to pick your fortune. I got a really good fortune. It said my wish will come true and someone will recover from an illness.











We wandered around and tried a few sweets from the street fair set up around the shrine. My favorite was this thing that looked like a lollipop with fruit in the middle. It had the flavor of a lollipop but the texture of caramel and was really yummy. They give you a little dish to hold it over which is made out of some sort of sweet rice cracker.
Next we walked from there for about a half hour over to the Edo Tokyo Museum. On the way we stopped at a store called Lawson, a convenience store which they have all over Japan. We read online that you could buy tickets to the Ghibli museum there. Ghibli is the anime museum Ru had highly recommended. Even though we printed directions on how to use the machine off the internet it had no English and was hard to figure out so we had to ask the store clerk for help. They were sold out for the time we wanted but we were able to book tickets for an afternoon before we left.
The Edo Tokyo Museum was awesome. As we walked in it looked a bit like a shopping mall and was in a very modern building. We bought tickets to the permanent collection and headed up to the 6th floor to look around.

































The museum focused on all aspects of Japanese history. It had lots of models of traditional Japanese towns including a life size kabuki theater. There also was a collection of woodblock prints which I fell instantly in love with.

As I looked at the prints I realized I forgot to pack my sketchbook. There was a time not so long ago that I didn't leave my apartment without a sketchbook and somehow I managed to go to a foreign city filled with art museums with no sketchbook. It made me really sad that I've started to really lose that side of myself.























 I spent 20 minutes doing a sketch of one of the prints on the back of my hotel reservations and felt a little better.















We ran out of time at the museum and it closed before we finished but we saw the bulk of the permanent collection. As we left we decided to try to stop by the Sumo stadium, Rogoku Kokugikan to see if we could get tickets. The office was closed, in keeping with our trip’s theme of poor timing, however the sign said they had plenty of tickets left.

We decided to try to get tickets the following day and headed back to the hotel. On the way we got a snack at a bakery where I determined I prefer Japanese bakeries over Chinese.











After a quick nap at the hotel we headed for a neighborhood called Golden Gai which lonely planet said was a popular bar district. We got off at the Higashi Shinjuku stop on the subway and wandered towards the area. It was a lot different then Lonely Planet’s description of narrow alleyways and rickety stairs and I wasn’t sure we were in the right area. Instead there were a number of sky scrapers with signs for numerous clubs, several of which offered some sort of “services” by the hour. We weren’t sure quite how they worked but assumed it was something like strip clubs. We wandered around a bit and ended up finding this random dart bar which served Mexican food for dinner inside one of the buildings.
We later discovered we had gone to Kabukicho (the red light district) rather than Golden Gai. Apparently, this area is famous for hostess clubs which offer companions, dancing and varying degrees of sexual favors. Hostess clubs are an interesting side to Japanese culture which I think in some small way stems from the Geisha culture, although I could be wrong. Almost all of the clubs have Nigerian men who stand outside and try to get you to come to their clubs. We had to arrange to see Golden Gai another night but Kabukicho was interesting.

1 comment:

  1. Great post. Asian pastries are a mystery because of the lack of dairy in the diet. It's really an oxymoron, like making cha shao bao made with veal. Like you said about eating cheese in Japan. Just not an authentic recipe. The Vietnamese pastries are probably closer to the Western ideal, just guessing. Re: the foreign sex trade in Japan, I am surprised that it flourishes there. Probably a combination of the Confucius rationalization of utilitarian sex serving some higher purpose and the general third class status of most Asian women, with the exception of most Gen X and Gen Y Chinese women. Provocative post!

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