Tokyo, Japan
Japanese jazz is a real and legitimate genre of music and if Josh and I abandoned our real lives and moved to Tokyo, we’ve decided we would start a jazz band and operate under the alias of Beard Papa (after a pastry shop we saw) and Yokohama Mama.
We talked about this and more during our morning stroll through Rikugien Garden yesterday – our last full day in Tokyo. The garden was so peaceful and the trees were buzzing with birds and fall colors. There were lots of adorable elderly people walking together and having snacks while watching Koi fish in the ponds. There was a traditional (sit on the floor) tea house in the garden, but the line looked long so we didn’t go in.
Instead we made our way to the Ikebukuru distinct for a lunch of conveyor belt sushi. Basically, it’s like fast food sushi. The chef prepares small plates of sushi and puts them on a plate to go around the restaurant on the conveyor belt. The customers pull off what they want to eat and place it on their table. We arrived at a place we found online called Sushiro. As soon as we walked in, we realized this wasn’t really an English friendly restaurant and there were no other foreigners in the waiting area. We saw other people going up to a machine and getting tickets.
We tried to do that too but there were multiple questions all written in Japanese. We finally just punched in some numbers got a ticket and took a seat. The waiting area was extremely crowded and the waitress kept calling things out over the loudspeaker. We were completely confused and, in a moment of hunger and defeat, we left the restaurant for something less authentic and easier.
Don't worry though, we got our dining moment of authenticity and confusion for dinner. We decided to do a nice dinner on our last night at Hibiki. Tokyo is significantly more expensive than Bangkok and Bali, so we have really toned down the extravagant lifestyle we were growing accustomed to in those cities and went back to penny pinching and making a dinner out of multiple trips to the hotel happy hour snack bar. Free carrot sticks? Why, yes, thank you. I’ll take thirty-two.
But last night, we felt confident enough in our budgeting to have a nice dinner out on the 47th floor of a nearby skyscraper. The restaurant was best known for its own brand of Japanese whiskey and it’s blowfish dishes.
Our plan was to do a set menu created daily by the chef. But the set menu included blow fish. And although, I’m sure the dish was fine and – frankly – I’d love to try blowfish, I decided having it the night before a long haul flight was not the best choice for my already high levels of flight anxiety. Now I can stress about the flight, Zika exposure from mosquito bites in Thailand AND blowfish poisoning. No thank you.
Josh and I spent the time we should have been looking at the menu having the above conversation and when the waiter came we were not ready. They had given us a special English menu, but our waiter and the staff were limited in their English speaking. So, we didn’t get across that we needed more time had to just order some stuff on the fly.
This resulted in us getting a plate of squid guts and rice delivered to the table, as well as, a bowl of fatty pork belly and cabbage.
The pork was actually pretty good, but it came with this additional plate of different lettuces and chili paste and seaweed. We had no clue what to do. Luckily, the couple beside us had ordered the same dish. So, we watched them use the lettuce like a taco shell and copied. At one point we drank out of our bowls because we thought what we had was a soup (which appeared to be appropriate). The server and bar tender laughed at us a little and later we figured out if you let the rice “soup” sit in the broth, it soaked it up and just became flavored rice and clearly not meant to be slurped from a bowl.
All in all, this was without a doubt the most culturally different trip we’ve been on. We’ve seen and done things in Asia that were so completely foreign it was hard to wrap our heads around and even more difficult to give them proper context in the blog.
It has been an incredible, scary, confusing, exciting, frustrating, beautiful time and, now, (20 hours and three flights away from home) I mostly just feel thankful that it happened and honored to share my experience with you. Until next time. . .
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