Sunday 13 January 2013

Tsukiji fish market, Imperial Palace, …

We started the morning at the Tsukiji fish market. The tuna auction wasn’t running so we were spared having to get up ridiculously early and had a more leisurely start to the day having a piecemeal breakfast from various places on the edge of the market. I don’t know what was in one of skewers we had but the others tasted good.

P1030383_041I also had something akin to scrambled eggs on a stick It had a light horseradish flavoured (so possibly wasabi) topping.

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The fish market itself had a variety of fish, shellfish and other things from the sea. We were wandering around near the close of the market and saw lots of machines moving things around. It was definitely worth the visit; quite a fascinating place.P1030388_046

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We went to a nearby sushi train restaurant for lunch that was really food. The fish in particular was super soft.P1030395_052P1030396_053

We then walked over to Ginza, which is a flash shopping area in Tokyo that has all the big named fashion labels and a superb Sony store.P1030401_057

Continuing our walk we headed to the Imperial Palace, Which has huge grounds but you can’t actually get very close to it,

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and some funky trees.

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The fountain garden across the road was a nice stop, where numerous water features would do there thing for a while.

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We then hopped onto the subway and headed to Akihabara, which is known as the electronics and anime place in Tokyo. The electronic shop area felt very much like being in Singapore or Hong Kong.

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After validating our JR Rail Passes in Shinjuku and booking trains to Hiroshima for the following day (which you can do without the days on the pass being considered started), we decided to head to the suburb of Nakano for dinner. What should have been an easy destination to get to, we managed to overly complicate by going on the Metro instead of the JR line, before we ended up reverting back to the Metro. It was an adventure, taking us about an hour to get there vs the 5 minutes it took us returning!

Nakano has a great local mall and some superb local restaurants.P1030418_073

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We found a nice yakitori bar for dinner where we were the only foreigners and had sake a beer called Hoppy that came with a glass of ice and what looked like water until you tasted it and it was more like a sake.

Stopping off at Shinjuku on the way back to our accommodation we played a drumming game in one of the many game arcades.

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We walked back to Shin-Oboku and went to a new bar that was in a basement about 100 metres from our accommodation that would probably take about 20 people max. This was a fun evening with more sake (this time from a cube), karaoke (although we didn’t participate), and waitresses dressed in a variety of customers (including as a cow). The waitresses all came at talked to us at one point of the evening and there were even a few drawings done to try and communicate.P1030429_084

It was an exhausting day where my Fitbit One showed we had walked 30,732 steps and covered 22.07km!

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