Japanese Deliciousness

One's first thoughts on Japanese food are probably sushi. Love it, hate it, never tried it, it's raw fish, a fact some people can't surpass. Sushi was all I really knew about Japanese food going in, so the recent vacation was a nice surprise. This post is somewhat of a walkthrough of the meals our family ate in Japan, including delicious sushi.

Food in Tokyo, Japan is a lot like it is in New York City. There's food from almost every culture, and top-notch chefs are there to deliver some great tastes. While on the trip, our family tested food from Turkey, India, Korea, as well as Japan. This is not to mention we also picked up a snack from Wendy's so I could have my first Frosty in 6 months.

Anyway, I'm just going to walk through what pictures I took from the experience, which mostly delves into the Japanese side.

An interesting meal was breakfast. We found a restaurant which offered a full breakfast, being a large piece of toast, a hard boiled egg, and a cup of coffee, for only 450 yen.

I didn't get any pictures of what ended in my favorite meals, which was mutton curry from an Indian restaurant. I did get a picture of our trip to the Turkish restaurant, which was maybe middle of the pack. Middle of the pack is still pretty good for this trip. At this restaurant we all tried to order something different. The meals ranged from some loose meat on a plate with side dishes to the one I ordered: a pizza. It's kind of a strange pizza because it looks like a fish.

One day in Harajuku, we stopped at the conveyor belt sushi joint, as mentioned. The sushi was so incredibly good there, I don't think I can get anything quite like it in Korea.

This one is fish eggs inside of the seaweed wrap:

Kelsey after eating wasabi:

Dave after eating wasabi, I think he is on what he likes to call a "wasabi experience".

We destroyed some sushi in this place, this is only about half of what we ate:
So after all of the meals, my favorite ended up as the Shabu Shabu beef. For anyone who doesn't know, this is very thinly sliced pieces of meat which are boiled in a pot of broth until brown, then put into a cup of sauce to cool and eaten. We ate at a restaurant which offered a 5 course shabu shabu meal, for quite a pretty penny. We ate the cheapest type of meat at about a quarter of the price of the most expensive one, which was still quite expensive.

This meat was ridiculously good:

Cooking in the broth:

This orange sauce was absolutely amazing:

Ironically, a few weeks after this meal I found a buffet restaurant in my town in Korea which offers all the shabu shabu you can eat, among other things. My first time there last week I ate about four plates of it, and I have plans with another friend to spend an entire Saturday afternoon there sometime.

My last meal in Japan, also one of my favorites, was Okonomiyaki. This is a mixture of eggs and vegetables among other things I don't know, and then a bunch of toppings. Some of the dishes are prepared in front of your eyes. All of ours were brought out after being prepared because there wasn't any space next to the table. We were really crammed into this table.

My dish had squid and octopus on it, which was awesome. All of these dishes ended up being really excellent.

Well, that's thats all I took for pictures of the food, which is kind of a lot considering that I took about thirty pictures of food over the trip.

Sayonara Japan

Here we are finally, for they last day of my family's trip to Japan. I managed to milk it for about 10 blog posts, so I'm definitely happy. It was a great vacation, so there's that, too.

The last day for me was rounding up a few odds and ends. The rest of my family left two days later, but I still needed find some souveniers to spend the rest of the yen I had in my pocket. We also never got a chance to see any of the crazy dressing Harajuku girls, so the family trotted out to Harajuku because it's also home to an Oriental Bazaar where souveniers could be had.

Unfortunately, being New Years, the Oriental Bazaar was not open, and once again none of the Harajuku girls were out. This was a pretty big bummer, but we found a few things to do. First we went to check out a place called Meiji Jingu in Harajuku which is a shrine to emporer Meiji. Since it was New Years, this place was ridiculously crowded. Ahem, see below.

We walked along with the crowd close to the temple, then decided to turn back again since we weren't sure what to do when we actually got to the temple and it would have taken forever. This is a wall of lanterns we saw along the way, I'm not really sure what their meaning is though.

This place was home to a souvenier shop, which we did check out. This was my jackpot because they had just about everything I wanted as far as gifts from Japan go. I managed to blow most of the rest of my wad of cash at the place. Heading back to the subway, we ran into this group of four girls in traditional Japanese outfits. They were super nice.

We had our last family meal together for at least 6 months at this really good okonomiyaki restaurant I'll talk more about in a future food post. Here's a photo of the fam anyway:

Since we were there in Harajuku, which has a ridiculous concentration of ice cream crepe stands, we decided to see what the big deal was about.

In short, I recommend. Mine was something filled with custard, chocolate, bananas, and whipped cream. Kelsey enjoyed her's, too:

That was the end for me as we headed off to the subway station to say goodbye. A Japanese girl nicely took this photo of the family:

A quick goodbye to limit tears, and I was on my way out of Japan.

My trip back was a bit ridiculous, I got to the airport just in time even though I arrived two hours early. It was a big travel day and there was a big pileup at the check in counter. I made it to my plane about half an hour before it took off, so that was OK. I made it to the Korean airport where I realized that I had forgotten my Korean ID card, so I was really nervous about making it through immigration. This ended up not being a deal at all, so that was OK, too.

I next took the subway to the bus station where the last bus to my town had left about an hour before I got there. This meant I was going to spend the night in a spa under the bus terminal. I took a shower there, which was nice, but the sleeping room was like torture. It was about 90 degrees in there so I was sweating and these guys kept making a bunch of noise. They kept sighing in their sleep like madmen everytime I was close to sleeping, so I didn't sleep a lot. I caught the 6:30 a.m. bus to my town, which was even worse than the spa. It was really really hot on the bus, and due to the amount of snow falling the trip took 3 and a quarter hours as opposed to the 1:30 it is supposed to take. Just torture. It was nice to be home, anyway.

Stay tuned for my last two posts about Japan. One will be about the souveniers I bough and another about the food.

Museum Day

Oops, I took a few days off there when I promised a post everyday, hope you don't mind. I was so busy not blogging. Today, though, I have a nice action packed post to make up for it. Well, it's as action packed as a day of visiting museums can be, but don't worry because there's a few nice surprises.

We wouldn't normally fill an entire day of vacation with multiple museums, but since it was New Years holiday, this was the only day I was there and museums were open. Therefore the motto was lets museum it up.

First was the Tokyo national museum, a popular attraction with a great collection of historical items, art, and many things samurai related.

Inside, I was most impressed by the amount of wood block prints they had, or ukiyo-e. This one is 'Landscape in the Snow' by Utagawa Kunitora.

Next is one of my favorite pieces I saw, 'Song of Everlasting Sorrow' which was made in the 17th century.

We also saw a variety of samurai swords, uniforms and other items. One of the most impressive of them was this piece of armor that lasted from the 17th century.

One of the nearby museum buildings displayed artifacts from various Asian countries such as China, Korea, and then artifacts from Egypt and the Middle East. This painted food bowl from Iran I found impressive due to the fact that it's from the early 5th millenium B.C. That's pretty old.

Since we were on such a museum high, we wanted to keep it going and headed to the Edo-Tokyo Museum. This museum covers the history of Japan and Tokyo during the Edo-period which was in the 18th and 19th century while Tokyo was still called Edo. This museum was also an architectural marvel because it was huge and was up on stilts. This also meant that we got to ride on these sweet escalators about 6 stories to get into the museum.

Inside, the museum had a very open feel. There are two levels of exhibits, and upon entering there was live music down just one floor in front of this historic looking building. These guys were really good too, two played the drums and then one played this stringed instrument. I'm not sure what it is called.

One of my favorite exhibits here was where they displayed how a Ukiyo-e, or woodblock print, was made. This picture shows the wood blocks at the bottom, the impression that each wood block would leave on paper, and then at the top the composite of all the wood block impressions. Really neat!

There were loads of historical artifacts and some set up for photo-opps. This is a good one with Dave carrying some water buckets.

There was so much more in this museum that I am not going to show pictures of here, so I think you'll have to go check it out yourself. The Edo-Tokyo Museum was definitely one of my favorite experiences on the trip. Here's a shot of the museum so you can see how it's posted up on giant pillars.

The museum was right next a Sumo stadium, but being New Years, there weren't any matches. We did, however catch two wrestlers while they were in the subway station, another highlight of my trip.

That night's dinner was yet another highlight, where we went and had shabu-shabu beef. I'll talk more about that in a post about food in a few days. We also went and checked out some of the entertainment in Shinjuku, near our hotel. We visited a pachinko parlor. I don't know if anyone reading is familiar with pachinko, but you basically put some money into a machine and then launch a bunch of tiny metal balls down a hole and lose all of your money. To be honest, I didn't really understand the game while playing. The machine, pictured here looks kind of like a washing machine decked out with some gnarly lights.
That was definitely one of my favorite days in Tokyo. We did go to check out a karaoke room after the pachinko, but it was ridiculously expensive for even just a half hour, so it didn't really seem worth it. Bummer, yes, but we had a good enough experience with a singing room in Korea.

Check back soon because I'm planning to write three more posts about Japan, including my final day, one about food, and one about souveniers.

New Years Day

This post is going to be short, but sweet. Well, short at least. New Years Day was one of recovery, we only ventured out to visit one sight while Kelsey stayed in and watched Back to the Future.

We figure since we were in Japan, why not do what the Japanese do? There's some kind of popular phrase about Rome like that. We went to check out the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa and found out that this really is what all the Japanese are doing.

The area we visited is called Asakusa, a pretty cool name which also ends in USA. It is home to a large Japanese brewery called Asahi. I found out later that this picture I had taken is of the Asahi headquarters, where the building on the left (slightly obstructed) is made to look like a mug of frosty ale. There's also a giant yellow blob.

So we made it to the area of the temple and it turned out a few hundred thousand people also wanted to visit that day.

The direct line for the temple was super long. Like three blocks down the row of souvenier shops and then another block or two. PACKED. We snuck down a side alleyway to try to get a peek and found sort of a shortcut to the temple. We got lucky and the traffic controllers let people from the sides in across the main route to go to the shops. We went in there, ducked inside of a shop, and joined the main route. We weren't going inside the temple anyway, so it wasn't that bad of a thing to do. This is a view of the shop alley:

This is one of the impressive temple buildings, but I don't think it's the main one. How's that for informative?

A dog we met along the way:

This was one of my favorites, this 5 story pagoda. Impressive:

We walked up near the temple, then went off to the side because we weren't sure what we would do once inside the temple. It was nice that all along the sides were stands with great Japanese food. By great Japanese food I mean all of the chocolate bananas you could ever want.

Here's one of the non-chocolate banana food stands:

This is a coy pond that I enjoyed:

Well, like I said, this one post is nice and short. I expect the one tomorrow to be more exciting since we went to Tokyo National Museum and the Edo Tokyo Museum. I took about 200 pictures that day so check back tomorrow.

Signs: They're Big in Japan

As anyone who has read this blog knows, I really like (am borderline obsessed with) cute cartoon characters and mascots on signs. The trip to Japan presented the opportunity to see another wacky Asian culture's take on how signs should be made. In Japan's case, they aren't nearly as heavy on the cutesy mascot type sign. That's a slight bummer, but they more than made up for it in all out zaniness.

The way I see it in my experience, there are three primary reasons that a Japanese sign is funny to me. Type 1: the designers designed it to be funny, and pulled it off. Type 2: the designers are going for something I completely don't understand and find hilarious. Type 3: sometimes my favorite, the Japanese word sounds like something in English. In the end, I think the reason number two definitely comes up the most.

I have in this post 15 of my favorite signs I saw in Japan, so hit the play button for some background music and enjoy:

This one is a totally common street sign. I think it's for a crosswalk or something about the sidewalk but the picture is just not clear at all to me.

This one was a HUGE sign in the electric district of some weird old dude.

This is actually a type 1, they want to discourage people from drinking and passing out in the subways. We could use signs like this in Korea, everywhere.

This sign was in the gondola near Mount Fuji, just oddly worded with a typo. I missed getting a picture of a guy holding this sign at a gondola stop that said 'The passenger who wishes to get off will raise my hand.'

This is on a toy vending machine, the character looks a little like a poo.

Something about not smoking....

Hey, it's another Type 1 spotting, from the famed Condomania.

I have no idea what this sign is going for, but I don't want my karaoke to leave me angry and nose deep in some water.

Just a sign I liked, maybe a restaurant?

Just Tommy Lee Jones tryin' to sell me some coffee.

This is an awesome sign that was down in a subway stop. The world needs more signs like this.

This was actually posted to warn about officers stationed to control traffic. I don't know if I would like being compared to an Alfalfa mouse.

If you're riding the crazy train, remember your point card.

Type 3!!!! But, it reminds me of the number 2.

Just a cute food court sign.

Anyway, thats it for today, I thought I would take a break from the day to day recaps and switch it up a little. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about New Years Day in Japan.