Sunday, April 02, 2006

Bright lights, big city


Saturday, April 1
We headed back to Asakusa to check out the side street arcades and cute little stores. There are a ton of street vendors making all sorts of interesting foods in Asakusa-one of our favorites are the cooked sesame crackers dipped in soy sauce and wrapped in nori (seaweed). Another favorite is the warm bean cake-basically a sweet batter filled with beans in an iron cast of some sort of fun shape-like a kabuki mask, or a fish, etc. Best eaten while warm and super yummy. After wondering afound a bit, we set out to get some tempura (which is a specialty of this particular area). Fodor’s had promised a cheap lunch at Aoi Marushin, the largest tempura restaurant in Tokyo. The tempura part true enough, and largest tempura restaurant seems likely, but it was not cheap. Afterwards, we made our way to the restaurant district Kappabashi, where we looked at all of the many chopsticks, rice cookers, pots and pans, sushi containers, and Japanese knives available for Japanese restauranteers.

After that, we went to Shinjuku, which is one of the busiest train stations in the city. Almost every type of train runs into this station-it’s like the Union Station/Grand Central Station of Japan, and when you exit, it is like being in the middle of Times Square. The streets are just a sea of people and it seems impossible to cross with about 1000 Japanese people all in a hurry heading your way, but somehow you are able to make it across the street unscathed and in one piece.

We walked around Shinjuku a bit, passing by the arcades full of weird games for all ages. We stopped at one arcade, where they had this wheel that you spin, and you win a ticket. Al and I decided to give it a try, and won a ticket, but then had no idea what to do with it. We had a pretty good laugh trying to figure it out. While trying to figure it all out, I looked up to see the weirdest commercial playing over and over again with these creepy dancing dolls—it was an ad for some sort of eel pasta or something, and I’m not sure what the creepy dancing dolls had to do with it, but it was mesmerizing and frightening all at once. Words can’t even begin to describe.


Once we walked around Shinjuku, we then headed to Shibuya—which has the giant telecom screen as seen in Lost In Translation. Al and I have definitely noticed that advertising is on such a different level than at home—almost everything has an advertisement of some kind-be it neon, a full screen of advertisements on a building, handouts at the subways, everything is so much more advanced as far as marketing goes. And, the technology—amazing. Everything is HDTV, and the cell phones, cameras, etc. are just mind blowing.

Shibuya was another huge area filled with an endless amount of people, all meeting up to hit the karaoke bars. Al and I have yet to go karoaking, b/c it is not like in the US where you sing to a group of strangers. Instead, you are supposed to get a group of your friends together and a get a room for karaoking, but since Al and I haven’t really met anyone to go out with, we decided it best not to pay a bunch of money to just serenade each other. But hopefully we’ll get a chance to do so in Okinawa—which is our next stop.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Keep It COMING!!!!

These updates rock! I feel like i am with on this one. I can hardly wiat to see the pictures when you return.

Next stop a visit to Boston to see me and some lobsters!! ilona