Tokyo, Japan
A word on Japanese toilets. The Japanese have the best toilets in the world and my life will be a complete failure if I don’t one day have a Japanese toilet in my own home (above the home theater and next to the bowling alley). All of the toilets are different, but so far I’ve encountered heated seats, music, calming water sounds, bidets of all kinds and an apricot scent releaser that I couldn’t figure out how to release (or where exactly it released to).
We finally had a museum day on this trip. Everyone who knows us knows we love museums and we’ve really been slacking on museum visits this trip.
Technically, we only we visited one museum, the Tokyo National Museum, but it had several different galleries located in different buildings on the grounds – including an Asia Gallery, a Japanese Gallery, the National Treasures Gallery and the National Museum Garden. The Japanese Gallery was our favorite and it housed a pretty cool samurai armor and sword exhibit – which was obviously way better than we one we recently saw at the Frist in Nashville.
One of the best exhibits was an interactive feature on fortune-telling in Asian culture. It talked about dream fortune telling, palm reading and tea leaf reading and there was a museum employee there to help tell your fortune. Basically you pick a bag of sheep bones then take out the four small bones and roll them like dice. Each side has a different shape related to an animal (sheep, goat, camel and cow). Depending how the bones fall, you get points in each category for how many bones landed on that animals side (between 0 and 4) those numbers (i.e. 0 cow, 1 sheep, 0 camel 2 goat) correspond to a chart with your fortune. Unfortunately, we both got bad fortunes and had to go to the good luck table counter for some good luck stamps.
Outside the museum there was a street food festival going on. I don’t know if this is an every Saturday thing or we just got lucky, but it was a great find right at lunch time. We visited several stalls, but played it safe with some wagyu (Japanese beef), long potatoes (fries), udon noodles and a set of 4 beer tasting (which included a bright green matcha/green tea flavored beer, that surprisingly wasn’t half bad). No grilled squid, beef tongue or whole fish on a stick for us. Food poisoning in Thailand really did a number on my adventurous pallet!
There was also a kitschy Edo Show going on at the festival, hosted by “Ninja Baller Tommy” (not sure if bad translation or on purpose). The show was in Japanese but you really didn’t need the words to understand a live version of the video game mortal combat. The show was obviously for children, but we both thoroughly enjoyed it right along with them.
After lunch, we visited the main Buddhist Temple in Japan Sensoji Temple. This was by far the most crowded site we’ve visited and there were really just too many people there to take in the atmosphere. Nearby we ducked out of the crowd for a Sake tasting at this little hole in the wall. We had three sakes, all chilled or room temperature. Their information was all in Japanese, except for a little excerpt on each. One was like a “free cloud,” one was like a “massive mountain,” and the last was a “calm wind.” These sake shots were served with a complimentary side of seaweed paper and dried squid. Yuck. I liked the cloud best, Josh liked the mountain best – but neither of us cared for the sake much at all.
Next we attempted to find a karaoke bar. Here, karaoke is much more professional and done in private rooms with just your group. Unfortunately, the first karaoke bar we went to was booked full. Not to be deterred, and running buzzed on sake, I saw a cutout of an anime girl with a microphone. Assuming this was another karaoke bar (I couldn’t read the Japanese, obviously) I rushed in despite Josh’s comment that he didn’t think this was karaoke. I was just about to pay the hourly rate (way higher than the other karaoke place) for Josh and me when I saw the signs in English behind the counter “Russian Elegance,” “What’s your fantasy?” and “GIRLS.” This was a strip club of sorts and we quickly exited.
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