I spent my New Year in Tokyo with Melania and her friend Steve – who lives in Shinjuku. We took the bus from Matsuyama and had a lovely twelve hour journey to get there... though I’m not so good at sleeping on public transport and got maybe two hours sleep scattered though the entire bus ride. We stopped every couple of hours so it wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep in the first place!
Luckily for us, Steve’s flat was about a five minute walk from where our bus stopped, so when we pulled in at about seven he was able to pick us up. At least that was the plan... he ended up getting lost trying to find the Starbucks we were camped in. In the meantime, of all things to happen, we bumped into another ALT from Ehime, who had also just got off the bus (she’s been in Kobe). After we found Steve, we hung out in his flat and freshened up before getting a taxi to our hotel and leaving our luggage there.
We were just up from a fish market that Melania wanted to visit, so we walked down and... it was insane. Seriously, it was just PEOPLE everywhere and once you got stuck in the crowd you were pretty much carried along by it. By this time, Melania and I realised we were hungry so we diverted to a sushi restaurant (Sushi Zanmai) and... well, that’s where we had breakfast.
Shishamo Karaage – my favourite, but not to everyone’s tastes (deep fried, whole pregnant fish)
Ikura (fish eggs), Uni (Sea urchin), Tamago (egg), Ama-ebi (“sweet” raw prawn), I-I can’t remember, Ootoro (fatty tuna), Hamachi, Maguro (tuna), Ika (squid), Salmon, and I think it’s Mackerel on the end.
Heaven. Miso soup with clams.
Buri? MURI! (impossible!!!)
Incidentally, we tried the buri. It was awesome. And we washed it all down with a bottle of warm sake between the three of us.
The atmosphere in the restaurant was amazing. It was a bar-style restaurant, ridiculously busy, and the seating staff always announced when there are new customers, to which the chefs would respond with a booming “HOOOOI!”. We couldn’t help but cheer along too ;) They seemed to be amused by us more than anything (Steve and I are white as white can be, and Melania’s Indonesian but raised in America, so she’s a bit of an oddity because they assume she can speak Japanese) and did their best to speak to us in English, which was very nice. Though we had one waiter who kept popping over every now and then to offer us the following fragments.
“I am Japanese. I am samurai.”
“I am Last Samurai.”
“Also, I am ninja.”
“...and geisha.”
From our sushi adventure, we blundered our way through the crowds, onto the metro, past signs that basically said, “If you friend falls into the tracks like an idiot, don’t rescue him, just leave him to splatter”, and ended up in Yokohama. This was our plan all along, of course, but it took a bit of trouble to get there – we realised that all the places we wanted to go were actually a transfer and a few stops away! We went to a ramen (or as they spelt it, Raumen) museum, which was set up like a city street/square that had the cutest little balloon modeller…
…the oldest cola machine…
…and had loads of little shops where you could eat... unfortunately we were still full from lunch. But that didn’t stop us popping in to a little bar they had and getting ice cream.
Because there’s always room for ice cream. After that, we headed back to the station and I don’t know how we got there/decided to go, but we ended up at a small fairground in Yokohama where we rode a ferris wheel with a clock on it (all the while watching a guy trying to make a move on his girlfriend in the next carriage on while an elementary school boy was waving at us from the carriage behind), took a bunch of Purikura in a booth that said it would make us naked but didn’t, bought tickets for a roller coaster that got shut down (but started up again later) and went on one of those spinning, whirly rides whilst screaming the whole time. We also looked at a haunted house but were too scared to go in. The outside was scary enough.
Melania and I later reached the consensus that this must be at least second base in Japan, though have formulated a theory that transfer of genetic material occurs simply when young couples hold hands. We spent a lot of time watching Asian dramas :/
(We tried to go for a totem-pole look. We failed.)
...so that happened! By the time we left it was dark.
We trekked bravely through an almost-deserted station (seriously, it was terrifying. This was TOKYO) and it was time for dinner... so we headed for China-Town for one of the WORST CONS IN HISTORY.
We ended up in this restaurant which looked amazing from the outside but inside... it was kind of a letdown. To begin with, it wasn’t even that well heated. We’d gone to China Town with the plan of eating the most delicious Peking Duck the world ever created, and I knew something was amiss when the waitress was saying something along the lines of “four sheets” – for rolls for ¥2400 – about £20. May I say that I tried to be the voice of reason, thinking that it sounded a bit fishy, but we decided to ditch our misgivings and go for it. Thank goodness we didn’t get two servings! What we got was four pancakes, mostly stuffed with cucumber and the tiniest, thinnest bit of tough duck skin.
…oh, and four prawn crackers, just to make sure we got our money’s worth.
The rest of the meal wasn’t so bad – the char siu was amazing both on its own and in steamed buns... but that was about it. We left the restaurant a little bit disappointed and found a real duck restaurant right around the corner >_< We were chilly in China Town, so after hunting for omiyage – travel gifts, usually food, that you take back to work to show you were thinking of everyone (we didn’t get any today), we headed back to central Tokyo for one of the most bizarre experience in my life.
Our train took us back to Shibuya and we decided to find a bar. Bearing in mind it was about nine pm and for all intents and purposes, I’d been up since the previous day, I was thinking a little wine, gentle conversation, and bed. What we found was Scramble, a little bar tucked underneath one of the station bridges on the other side of That Crossing. You know, the one that epitomises Japan.
Scramble, as it turned out, was an absolutely packed bar with extortionate drink prices and the cheesiest music selection I’ve ever come across. It happened while I was lunging down from my barstool to get some cash for Steve for the next round. Granted, my face was practically in his lap so I didn’t anything until I was upright…
…and this guy was looming down on us.
Now, he’s come back from an enkai (office drinking party) so he was pretty drunk. And he just started dancing in the street and making “I love you” signs through the window. Later, we realised he was making them at Steve XD
…but what was funniest was that between us, we actually managed to get some other people dancing, too. If I can upload a video one day I will, but words cannot describe the spectacle of five grown Japanese guys dancing in the street at your will.
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