Saturday 4th July 2015
Due to much body clock confusion, we woke up ridiculously early and then managed to get back to sleep and re-woke up ridiculously late on our first full day in Japan. After that first morning we managed to avoid any more jet lag, which was pretty good considering we had ‘travelled forward’ eight hours in time.
One of our main reasons (ok…the main reason) that we wanted to travel to Japan was for the food – and after a dirty McDonalds on our first night, our first mission was to find some sushi! I had seen photos from a fellow blogger, Adam (http://adamsgrandtour.com/), of a fabulous looking conveyor belt place which we naively tried to find with only a local Metro station for directions (see previous post on how many exits a Metro station can have…). We walked from our apartment for about 10 minutes to Akasaka Station in the rain…
I want to make a quick mention of the rain here. Before we left for Japan, if I said to anyone with any Japanese knowledge that we were going in July, the response I always got was “yikes, it will be so hot!!”. Not once did anyone mention that it would pretty much rain 24/7 for the entire time we were there! If I had known before, it might have put me off booking the trip in July, so I’m glad that I didn’t know as it really didn’t have a negative effect on our adventure at all. In fact, it definitely added to the excitement at times (a later post will cover climbing Mount Fuji in a typhoon!). Plus, the Japanese are so efficient and used to it that a little (or a lot) of rain doesn’t stop anyone (with the exception of the awful floods that they have had this week). Clear umbrellas are on sale cheaply everywhere and everyone has them! So don’t let the rain put you off booking a trip to Japan in July – it was always warm and, as well as the rain, we also got some really beautiful days.
Anyway, rain aside – we got the Metro from Akasaka Station to Suitengumae Station where we aimlessly walked around for a while, peeking in restaurants in the hope of seeing a fabulous conveyor belt full of sushi. Hungry, we eventually gave up and settled for a ramen shop that we spotted on a corner. I say ‘settled’ but it turned out to be really tasty plus, like many other places we went on to eat at in Japan, it was rather fun! We started off by looking at the display of plastic food in the window (very handy with the very very limited Japanese we had between us), taking a note of the number of the dish we wanted. Then we headed inside the little café-like place, put money in a vending machine and pushed the button of the dish number. The machine printed little tickets for us both and we handed these to the waiting chefs and took a seat. After about five minutes, the chef signalled that our food was ready and we went up to collect it at the counter. Like most places, there is free drinking water to take and our ramen came to only about £2 each!! I’m sure it wasn’t the fanciest of places to get ramen but we both thought that it was delicious and attempted to do some slurping (slurping your noodles in Japan is a compliment to the chef). A great first Japanese meal!
After lunch, we got lured into a Pachinko parlour by the bright, colourful lights. We went to a few Pachinko parlours during our time in Japan. In one place in Kyoto a man who worked there gave us beginners guides in English and actually helped us to play for a while. Despite this, I still have absolutely no idea how to play. When you walk into a parlour, apart from being in awe of the bright lights and rows of people glued to the machines with huge trays of silver balls stacked up behind them, you will be totally blown away by how loud the place is! Japan-Guide explains the game quite well as “a mixture of slot machines and pinball”. You buy the little silver balls, which you feed into the machine and (I think…) the only thing you then control is the speed that you feed the balls into the machine. Then for some reason unknown to me, sometimes you get silver balls back out again. There’s also a screen on your machine where loud, creepy, horror film like Japanese cartoon clips come up, such as Japanese school girls creeping into a dark, scary room. The whole Pachinko experience totally confused me but it was brilliantly Japanese and I managed to stop David gambling away too much of our Yen on tiny silver balls!
Back on the Metro and we headed to Tokyo Sky Tree to take in some bird’s eye views of the city. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have done this on a rainy, overcast day. We waited in a queue for a very long time, paid, and waited in another queue for the elevator for a very long time. When we got to the top, the views were (obviously) quite obscured by the cloud. It was so busy at the top that it wasn’t very enjoyable and I’m sure it would be even busier on a clear day. However you can see Mount Fuji on a clear day so it might have been worth while. If you don’t fancy paying, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building has free observation decks.
Next on our list was to visit the famous Shibuya Crossing – one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in the world. We walked out of Shibuya Station and were met with the Crossing! I’d seen so many pictures of this place that it felt a bit like walking into a guidebook. I just read on Lonely Planet that it is “guaranteed to give you that ‘Wow – I’m in Tokyo’ feeling!” – so true! There’s a Starbucks that overlooks the crossing and we headed there to sit down and watch the world go by for a while in the best people watching spot in the world. Though busy, we quickly managed to get a seat by the window overlooking the crossing with our hot chocolate and decaf coffee (note – decaf coffee is pretty much impossible to come by in Japan and caused a lot of confusion and a 10 minute wait). It was a busy, rainy Saturday night and I loved watching everyone scurrying across the road when the green man appeared, under a canopy of clear umbrellas and with a backdrop of neon signs. It was also quite amusing to watch the tourists go back and forward across the road trying to get pictures and narrowly avoiding getting run over. After Starbucks, we did just that and got some photos!
We headed further into Shibuya and its neon lights, walked by many karaoke bars and stumbled across a sushi restaurant (Genki Sushi) with a conveyor belt – hurray! We put our name on the list and waited outside for about 40 minute (beside a comic book store that you can sleep in and has a very catchy jingle playing on a loop). It was amazing! Not only was it worth the wait, we actually decided that it was worth our entire trip to Japan for this restaurant alone! Each person has a screen in front of their seat, which can be changed to English, and is used to order your dishes. The food then gets delivered to you on a little train from the kitchen! The food was so tasty and cheap – we paid about £22 for 17 plates plus a few drinks. Highly recommend Genki Sushi if you’re in Shibuya!
Happily full of sushi, we headed back to our apartment by jumping on the Metro to Akasaka-Mitsuke. We emerged from the station very confused…we should have gone to Akasaka Station and not Akasaka-Mitsuke. Using our instincts (and backed entirely by luck) we wandered back to the apartment, stopping in a British bar we walked past, to judge the Guiness (a bit sweet according to David).
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