Kaiseki Junction
Trip Start
Oct 03, 2008
1
13
18
Trip End
Oct 19, 2008
Tokyo,
Kanto,
Japan
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Last night we met up with Kirill's brother Sasha and his girlfriend Mai who treated us to a great night out and introduced us to the wonders of Ginza (kind of like 5th Avenue in Japan) and, more importantly, after missing out last week, Kyoto's local cuisine kaiseki. Basically it's a continuous stream of food. It's like the Temple of Doom but the food doesn't move, and the monkey brains aren't chilled. It was, in short, my dream. We had caviar, edamame, potato salad, lotus, mushroom, white fish, beef, miso soup, etc, etc. Happy, happy days!
After dinner, we walked down the main street of Ginza and said our farewells and headed back to the hostel as we had a early morning looming - a five o'clock start to go to the fish market at Tsukiji. Unfortunately, sleep was somewhat interrupted by our new roommate, the wonderfully Spanish Sergio ("my English is *blows raspberry*") having what sounded like night terrors and a touch of The Exorcist, and shouting "oy, oy, oy" at the top of his voice more than once. It was so bad he shaved his conquistador beard this morning. Sad times.
The fish market was a sight to behold. It was essentially row after row of newly caught fish (some not even quite dead yet), split by extremely narrow alleys with these strange barrel cars speeding down them and, I'm convinced, actually aiming at the annoying gaijin and their stupid cameras. That's us by the way. The main shock of the day was the sheer size of the tuna. I knew they were bigger than most people thought but I didn't realise they were bigger than Amit. One guy was using an industrial saw just to get any purchase on it!
After the market we went to the nearest sashimi restaurant for some incredibly fresh fish - mostly tuna and salmon but I did have some cuttlefish, octopus and eel. The eel was the best. We then admitted defeat and headed back to the hostel to catch up on some much needed sleep.
At 12 we woke up again and set off to do some more shopping in Harajuku (where the trendies shop - yes, we bought some stuff) and check out the Shibuya crossing made famous in Lost In Translation (just watch it Alex, you'll find this blog a lot easier to follow!) We then slipped into one of the arcades to retry Street Fighter 4. This time the Japanese battered all of us and not just me, and we left with our tails between our legs.
We have now extended our stay in Tokyo by two more nights and will be doing Nikko and Matsushima Bay by day trip - the bad news about all this? I'll have plenty of time to write more blog entries!!!
