Tsukiji, Ginza, Tokyo National Museum, Asakusa, Monja-Yaki

I've heard a lot about the fish market in Tsukiji, so I was determined to visit it during this trip. I have apparently been to Tsukiji when I was younger, but don't really have any memory of it. Here is what Bourdain says about the market (from A Cook's Tour):

I've written about Tsukiji in the past, and used up most of the superlatives I can think of. Just take my word for it: It's the Taj Majal, the Colosseum, the Great Pyramid of seafood. All that unbelievable bounty, spread across acres and acres of concrete, wriggling and spitting from tanks, laid out in brightly colored rows, carefully arranged like dominoes in boxes ... I am inadequate to the task of saying more. There is nowhere else. Believe me.

My parents have been going there for years -- before it became popular with tourists, even.

Anyway, we woke up early, had a quick bite to eat and then took the JR to the nearest station, and then a cab to the market. Like an utter fool, I decided not to bring my Hasselblad. The film I had (velvia 100) doesn't perform all that well under fluorescent lights, and Tsukiji has been heavily photographed before, but still... it would have been fun! Nothing, not even Bourdain's excellent description, can really prepare you for the shock-and-awe nuclear assault on all your senses. It's also pretty dangerous for the unwary outsider, what with the motorized go cart things speeding around in all directions and especially through very narrow alleyways. It really woke us up in a hurry to have to look in all directions every few seconds to avoid getting flattened.

Some ice:

squid:

???

tuna

shellfish

tuuuuunaaaaa


>


You might have noticed that most of the fish are packed in styrofoam containers. What happens to the containers? They are put into the foamcontainerator2000


We had sushi at a restaurant right next to Tsukiji -- almost in it, actually, and it was fantastic: some of the best hamachi and mirugai I have ever eaten.


After the sushi, Chloe got a dreamy look on her face which lasted for several hours afterwards and was accompanied by her periodically mumbling things like "that was really good hamachi"

We continued on to see the Ginza district: Here's Kenji dancing across the street:

me in front of the mac store:

a woman in a kimono


From here, we went to the Tokyo National Museum and saw all kinds of interesting things, like the ceramics displays, a mini-display on the Ainu, many scrolls and some Harunobu ukiyo-e. They were doing a workshop on how people sealed letters back in the Shogunate days, which Chloe and Kenji participated in. Now they know how to send letters to their disciples and foot warriors in style!


After lunch at the museum restaurant and more museuming, our family friends picked us up and took us to the ningyo-cho neighborhood, where we bought 250¥ rice bowls and some cool wooden chopstick rests. Here's the chopstick rest store:
We also went to several of the stores that sell the wax and plastic displays which Japanese restaurants typically have in front of them (go to Japan town in San Francisco if you haven't seen them before). They're extremely expensive, but usually amazingly real looking. Here are some selections:









From here it was a trip to the overrun but interesting Asakusa district and Sensoji temple.

They sold pudding along the way in a format that I haven't seen before:


Chloe got a headache at this point, and unfortunately we had to cut our dinner short at a monja-yaki place in Tsukushima, which was a shame, because we were about to get yaki-Ramen when Chloe got REALLY sick.



After Chloe was dropped off at the hotel, I headed out with Kozo to Shinjuku to check out the prices on a camera I had been eyeing to replace our Sony T3. Yodobashi had it for $50 cheaper than in the states, so I picked one up, and it will probably be where most of the shots on this blog come from, from now on. So far the blog has been produced on two digital cameras: the Canon Powershot G2 and the T3. The camera (Canon powershot 640) has so far been wonderful, and it's hard to beat 10 mexapixels and a lot of nice manual controls for less than $300.

Tsumago and Tokyo

Chloe and I spent the morning walking around buying gifts for people back home, and walked up to the site of an old castle. We tried our hands at climbing the slippery and dusty bamboo along the way


I saw this amusing sign on the side of the road:

dont make the telephone cry!!!
This would make a cool T-shirt (minus the Kanji)

My parents told us to go into a museum that had been made out of the town head honcho's house

A set of stoves:

ingenious outer sliding door design, which I might borrow for Alta:

A beautiful enclosed garden:

After packing up, we took the train to Nakatsugawa, then Nagoya, where we ate at the Paul restaurant in the station and watched the bullet trains go by



and then on our own bullet train to Tokyo. I got my dad to read me an article in the Bullet train magazine (WEDGE magazine!) about the new series of bullet train thats coming out. It's quite similar to the very cool 700 series train shown above, but with a longer nose and aerodynamics that have been optimised by a genetic algorithm... very cool.


images stolen from WEDGE magazine
Apparently it's the first time that a GA has been used to optimize a trains shape.

Once in Tokyo, we took the JR lines from the station to Iidabashi where my mom had scored some relatively inexpensive rooms at the opulent Grand Palace hotel. Kenji kept asking the taxi driver and then the porter -- "this is the GRAND PALACE, right? in iidabashi? " because it didn't look like the usual kind of hotel that they stay at in Tokyo. We got ripped off at a local Izakaya, walked around and then went back to the hotel. I noticed along the way that the Rod Stewart/ Liza Minelli style haircuts seem to be really popular in Tokyo now, and they look just awful.

Our hotel room had one of those electronic ass washers on the toilet. I'd seen them before of course, but had limited my use of them to trying to spray my dad with them as he walked by the bathroom door. Chloe had tried this one and said it worked, so I got up my courage, and decided to try it out. It turns out that there was a "pressure" knob which Chloe had turned to the maximum (she denies this), so I got a little bit of a surprise when it turned on... but I thought to myself: Chloe used it, so it shouldn't be a problem for me, right?! Well, no. It's hard to put this delicately, but suffice it to say that the result was less like a bidet, and more like the word that starts with an "E" and ends in an "a". So my advice to the first time Japanese toilet enthusiast is to turn the pressure way down. Waaaaaay down.

Tsumago

Today we took a series of trains from Kyoto (bye bye Amherst House!!) to Tsumago. The trip required a layover in the boring and ugly town of Nakatsugawa, but Chloe and I were fine with it, having both been sickened by the train ride from Kyoto. The conductor had been a woman for one section of the train, and Kenji had jokingly but extremely loudly announced his displeasure at having a "female" drive the train. The other American tourists next to us did not seem particularly amused. From Nakatsugawa, we took another train to Tsumago



Tsumago is along the old post road from Kyoto to Edo, and had been written up in the New York Times. Gail had booked us into a guest house in Tsumago for the night. Someone had subsequently told us that it was a popular Gaijin destination, but we saw nothing but Japanese people when we got there! I'm not sure where all the Americans on the train were staing, but apparently not in Tsumago. We dropped off our luggage and because of the late-ish hour, took a taxi to Magome and walked the trail back to Tsumago. We stopped in at the Hinoki store:


At 8 km long, I strongly advised Kenji to take the taxi and start from the halfway point, but he refused and suprised both Chloe and I by hiking 90% of the trail and taking a taxi for the final bit because it was getting dark. We're not sure where he's getting the energy from, but he has no more excuses for not walking to Solano anymore: if you can walk five miles of mountain trails, you can walk the one mile on flat pavement. The post road itself was lovely, passing through Cedar and Bamboo forests as well as alongside small clusters of houses and rest houses.







The guest house itself was a traditional japanese house with ricepaper screens, tatami

and even a fish pond full of gigantic Koi

We had dinner,


which had small heavily salted and angry looking grilled fish:

and completely coincidentally had Koi as one of its dishes



and then took a bath. The town empties by around 6 PM, so I wandered around taking pictures with the Hasselblad for a while, then came back to go to sleep. Chloe and I slept soundly and comfortably on our futon, but my mom was kept awake by a snoring guy in the next room, who got up at 5:00 AM to chat with his wife for an hour. I have to say that a futon is really a lot better than all but the fanciest western style mattresses that you find in hotels. Said another way: a guest house futon is almost never a back breaker, while hotel matresses almost always are.

Chloe and Kenji along the main street of Tsumago