San (Tokyo)

Sunday 5th July 2015

Our second full day in Japan was spent further exploring Tokyo and our first stop was taking in some culture at the Edo-Tokyo Museum. The museum entry was pretty cheap at 600 Yen (about £3) for adults and there were audio guides available in English for a refundable deposit. The museum is right beside Ryogoku Station (A4 exit according to the website) and is a pretty ugly concrete building from the outside. You buy tickets at the booth at the bottom and go up huge escalators to the exhibition. I find it really difficult to be interested in museums (too much self learning maybe!?) but David loves a museum and enjoyed it. There were huge miniature models of life in Edo-Tokyo which you can look at through binoculars and…well, then I fell asleep on a chair for a while (we’ll blame the jet lag) while David continued to explore.

Next on our list was a very Japanese experience – a cat café! We had a look on TripAdvisor and decided on Cat Café Nyafe Melange in Shibuya. En route, we found some ramen for lunch in a little place near Ebisu Station. This place also had a machine to select your meal from but no handy plastic food so the young Japanese guy working there helped us. He didn’t speak much English but we both ended up with delicious ramen. My dish was similar to what we’d had the day before but David’s was served as a bowl of plain noodles, a bowl of curry flavoured stock and the toppings on a separate plate so he dipped things in the stock and ate. Both super tasty!

After lunch we tried to find the cat café and ended up wandering about lost (again!). Eventually we gave up and I asked an older lady that was working in a convenience store. She led me outside the store and pointed down the street, explaining in Japanese where to go. I gave her a very confused look to show that I couldn’t understand her. She then looked at the store she was working in then signalled for me to quickly follow her and ran down the street with me following and David behind! We ran for about a minute (me laughing at how ridiculous the situation was!) until she pointed out the door of the cat café and ran away back to work, with me shouting Arigatou gozaimasu after her!

The cat café was on the second floor of a building which seemed to be a mix of offices/apartments. We went into the reception and could see a big room to the side, with lots of cats lazing around and six people sitting dotted about. The lady at the reception handed us both cards with information in English about prices and also some guidance, such as wash your hands before going into the café. We washed our hands and got locker keys each then went into the café and put our bags into the lockers. The café was a long room with windows over looking the street at one end. There are sofas along one wall, some shelves, lots of cat climbing posts and cat toys and brushes dotted around. There’s a room through the back which we weren’t allowed in but the cats could wander in and out of, if they wanted some peace from customers. I think that there was about 15 cats in the café, all lazing around the place. Some were quite friendly and some were quite happy to snooze on a shelf out of the way. There’s a window that goes through to the reception and from there you can order drinks and cat treats. We didn’t buy any drinks (which wasn’t a problem at all) but invested in some cat treats to try to make some feline friends. The treats were little tubs of dried fish, which the lady made up when you ordered. David opened his tub and was swiftly robbed of the entire lot by a swarm of cats! I tried to share mine around but some of the cats were big fans of the strange dried fish and I soon had an empty tub too! Cat Café Nyafe Melange has a few mixed reviews on TripAdvisor and I just read one that questioned if the cats were actually drugged. I really doubt that, especially from how fast they moved when the treats appeared. Sure some of the cats are snoozing and a lot of them don’t approach you unless you have treats but that’s general cat behaviour! We enjoyed our trip and think that they were treated well.

After about an hour of hanging out and being robbed by cats who only wanted to speak to us for treats, we headed to Shinjuku Station to activate our JR Passes. The station was crazy busy and there are lots of signs for various JR things but we eventually managed to find the desk to trade our Exchange Orders for the passes. When you exchange your voucher for your JR Pass (which must be done within three months of issue), you can ask for it to start on any date within a month. We asked for ours to start the next day as we were heading off to Kyoto. The process took about 10 minutes and then we went across to the ticket office to reserve some tickets. With the JR passes, you can reserve seats on any of the trains that you are taking. Most trains had a couple of unreserved carriages and I think we would have got seats on most trains without reserving but we generally booked seats in advance when we were enquiring about train times.

After the JR passes and seats to Kyoto were sorted, it was time to find food once again! I had heard of the basement floor of department stores being good for food and we had spied an interesting looking place downstairs in Shinjuku Station so headed down to check it out. It was amazing!! The place was absolutely massive, with a huge variety of delicious looking food from sushi (of course) to a bakery to beautiful cakes and chocolates. I was in heaven and annoyed David by wandering about the place taking pictures of food instead of picking what I wanted! It was super busy and people on the counters were touting for your business as you walked by (even though I think they were all working for the same company). If you go to these department store places after a certain time (I think we were there about 7pm), a lot of the food is discounted. We got huge packs of sushi for 900 Yen (about £4), prawn tempura, salad and some cakes. If there was a store like that in Edinburgh, I would buy food from there every night! We paid for our food, which was bagged up with ice packs to keep it fresh, and got the metro back to the apartment for an absolutely delicious carry out!