**Note - This one seems to be kind of long. Here's the summary of our days in Tokyo. This way if you see us soon you can at least pretend to have read parts of it. Temple, shops, park, museum, electronics on Tuesday. Fancy stores, super modern buildings and a baseball game on Wednesday. Fish market, a flight, and a burger on Thursday.**
Woke up today, to everything gray. Again. Tuesday morning was just as dreary as Monday, but once again we were not going to let that stop us from doing everything we planned on doing. Except our first planned stop, the Ryogoku Sumo district. We found out it was pretty unlikely to be able see any sumo practice, and wandering the streets in the rain hoping to catch a glimpse of some fat guy in a dress (if we're lucky) didn't really seem as exciting. Instead we headed out to the Senso-Ji temple complex. The story goes that some time in the 7th century two dudes fished a gold statue out of the river. Naturally, they though "Woah, this must be holy. Let's build a massive shrine in its honor." So they did. There is nothing wrong with this temple, and perhaps we'd even be impressed if it was one of the first few dozen we have seen over the last month and a half. Unfortunately, it turns out we've hit our temple saturation point. Other than the massive gate in front guarded by two of the most buff statues you'll ever see, we tired of it quickly. Oh well. Luckily the whole street leading up to the temple is a massive crafts/souvenir shopping district, so we kept ourselves entertained for a while. It was around this time that we saw our first sunlight of the week and realized we probably should have put on sunscreen. Oops.
Our next stop was Kappabashi Dori, a street lined with cookware, knives, restaurant wholesale shops, and ceramic serving pieces, but most of all fake food! This little district is the city's headquarters for unbelievably realistic plastic food that the restaurants all use to display their dishes. Both the detail work to make the food look real and the specialization to make each piece look exactly like the food served in the restaurant is amazing. Our favorite was the gravity defying spaghetti plates with a forkful hanging in midair with a few strands of past connecting it to the plate.
We then head over to Ueno Park and explored for a bit. When I say explored I mean walk from one map to the next one 40 meters away, checking each time to make sure we were still on the same straight path. I do love that there are maps EVERYWHERE in this city, and that each one has a very helpful "you are here" marking which even shows which direction the map is facing. What I can't stand is that most maps don't face the same way! On one map north can be up, but on the next map they've turned everything around and north faces diagonally down and a little to the right. I think this inconsistency is why so few of the Japanese people who tried to help us by looking at a map (which was a pretty sizable sample of the population by the time we left town) had so much trouble using it. I blame the school teachers. By now there were actually patches of blue in the sky, which made us very happy. We walked to the zoo and were told the giant panda exhibit was closed, which made us very sad. Instead we learned about various forms of Japanese art at the national museum.
Our next stop was the bustling neon Akihabara electronic district, including the massive 7 story electronics store in the Akiba building (go cougars). Definitely some cool toys to play with, though we probably would have gotten more out of it if we a) knew more about electronics or b) could read Japanese. We still had fun playing with the cameras, ooo-ing and ahh-ing over both the gorgeous massive LCD monitors and the tiniest little laptops you've ever seen, walking through row after row of stalls of shops selling electronic pieces I'll never be able to identify, and trying out the new wii controller (which, as it turns out, has been released in the states since we left, making me feel much less special).
Tuesday night was not fun. We will not go into detail, but let's just say that many of the aforementioned helpful but map-illiterate Japanese passersby and convenience store clerks were involved, as was a restaurant called Thanks Nature that was not vegetarian, super sore legs, and some very steep hills. Also an actual vegan place kind of in the middle of nowhere and the best pumpkin salad we've ever had.
The original plan was to wake up around dawn to go to the fish market on Wednesday. After a very tiring day Tuesday, we scrapped that plan and slept all the way until 8! Our first stop was the Ginza district, which is most comparable to 5th Avenue in New York. Block after block of trendy shops and huge fancy department stores. Since they don't open until 10, we had a few minutes to walk around and watch the crowds form at the door. The store opening was surprisingly quite a site to see. First the clerks unlocked and opened the doors, but no one went in, which I thought was a bit odd. It turns out they were all waiting for the clock tower to ring at exactly 10 oclock. At the very last chime of the bell, all the clerks in the door bowed and the very orderly mad rush began. What was really cool about this was walking through the first floor (cosmetics and perfume), the girls at every counter were waiting along the main aisle, waiting to bow as each shopper passed them by. It was sort of like a backwards stadium wave, and it certainly felt like I was getting more respect in those 45 seconds than a week in the classroom. This store had some terrific kimonos which we thought about buying, but were sort of turned off by the $850 price tag. On the sale rack. It's crazy how quickly we went from being the rich guys in town in SE Asia to looking at price tags and being caught somewhere between laughter and tears in Tokyo. It's all relative, I suppose. It really is amazing how our own habits from home determine what we think of a place we visit. We go to Thailand and wonder how people deal with running water they can't drink their whole lives and toilets that don't flush. I wonder if Japanese tourists come to America and think, "What type of subhuman barbarian would want to use a toilet without an electronic seat warmer and bidet?"
Lunch was over at the fish market for some of the freshest sushi in the world. I'm not such a sushi person (I'll eat it, I just prefer stronger flavors, i guess), but Adina enjoyed her $6 bite of tuna. We then took the monorail (what's that word?) across the bay to Odaiba, a super modern and very touristy neighborhood with some crazy architecture and futuristic museums. They're very big into buildings with large holes cut out of the middle over there. They also have a huge Ferris wheel (just like the Millennium Eye) next to a Roman style indoor mall whose ceilings replicate the sky at different points of the day (ahem, Caesar's?), a replica statue of liberty, and good views of the Tokyo Tower, a bigger and redder version of the Eiffel Tower. For a city filled with ingenuity and creativity, they sure like to copy other people, too. Apparently there was some kid oriented anime festival going on in Odaiba, which made the area super crowded and really hard to get around. Despite that, some of the design and technology was really cool, as was some of the stuff in the giant Toyota showroom. Since we didn't have 3 hours to wait on line, we decided to skip the automatically steered electric car system they were letting people test ride. Maybe next time.
Then, we headed back to town to catch a baseball game. The mighty Tokyo Yakult Swallows were hosting the Yokohama BayStars in a true clash of the titans. Or not. It turns out the Swallows are Tokyo's version of the Mets. Every one knows and most people love the crosstown Giants (If you've ever heard of a Japanese baseball team, I'm sure it was the Yomiuri Giants) who play in the famous stadium (Tokyo Dome), have won more championships than any one else in the league, and always manage to lure the big names. The Swallows, on the other hand, exist in the Giants' shadow as they struggle to fill their much smaller and dinkier park, are not televised every day like the Giants are, and do not have the big names. Though one former Swallow is Charlie Manuel, World Series winning manager (that's for you, Tali), and Babe Ruth played an exhibition game here. The game was just as exciting as any other baseball game (I'll let each of you interpret that as you see fit), but what makes it totally different are the fans. Constant cheering from the bleachers, and each batter gets their own chant (which were hard to join in on seeing as we don't know the words they were singing. We tried yelling English words that kind of sounded like the Japanese we hear. The best we came up with was "Goya, Goya, Makes me Fart!") the Canadian on the team gets dozens of Canadian flags around the stands for each at bad, as well as Oh Canada once or twice. If only he wasn't 0-3 with RISP and two outs. There are also some great rituals, like the fifth inning fireworks show, the 7th inning "cheerleader" dance, the pre--game fight song singalong (we'll have that video up on facebook eventually), and thousands of umbrellas popping up and being waved in the stands after each home team run. According to the Google, this is meant as a sign to the opposing pitcher that it is time to hit the showers. Also, the visiting team also had a huge section of fans in the left field bleachers, but I couldn't tell if that was always the case or just because the BayStars happen to be from nearby. There's also a pep band in the fans, just like a college basketball game. Sadly, there was no kosher concession stand but we did find perfectly spherical pre-packaged baskin robbins cones. And, of course, the big news of the night was for the first time in our lives we made it onto the jumbotron (a super crisp and super big HD screen)!! It pays to be the only whiteys in the joint. The Swallows lost (so sad), but luckily not until the 12th inning, after we were long gone and eating one more veggie Indian dinner. Seriously, I can promise you our little food tour of NYC will NOT include Curry Hill.
Wednesday night #1 we only got a couple of hours of sleep before waking up at the crack of ass on Thursday morning #1 to make it to the actual market part of the morning fish market (not just the sushi lunch section). It really was a crazy scene. Evetry one was in a rush, there were little refrigerated trucks and fisherman on these motorized carts zooming in all directions. There were men running up and down the aisles looking for what they need and the tourists in rolled up pants were taking pictures while trying not to be run over by a speeding vehicle or splashed by a fluttering fish. And all over the place there were fish, shrimp, prawns, crab, octopi, squid, and many others I can't even identify being butchered and sold at breakneck speed. We found one large room that looked like a giant morgue of huge (probably 6 foot long and super fat) fish lined up in rows and tagged with numbers from the auction. The efficiency with which these guys could grab a live fish out of the tub, plop it on the table, slice off the head at just the right angle to cut it perfectly (which must be tough when the fish is still twitching), then take a good whack at the tail, wait for the fish to give one last shudder and throw it on the pile with the rest.
After hauling ass to the airport, we were ready for a click of the ruby slippers and a little time travel. A quick negative 25 minutes (and about 6 movies on our individual screens) later, we were in JFK looking for meat. One cool moment on the flight was when I realized it was midnight (local time) and we could still see the sunlight out of the left side of the plane. I suppose this still doesn't count as having visited the land of the midnight sun, but it's as close as we're going to get for now. We took a bus to town which conveniently stopped at grand central, leaving us enough time to grab the most anticipated burger of our lives. The staff at Mendy's didn't understand why we were crying and thanking Buddha for his bounty. We knew we were home when, about a minute and a half off the bus, we run into our old roommate Ari waiting in line to buy a hot dog. It took a minute before we realized that we were back in the real world and that sort of thing isn't so crazy anymore. <Sigh>
This weekend is Shabbat at Adam's and then Amy's wedding, followed by the Met's game with Mike and Rebecca on Monday and probably heading up north on Tuesday or Wednesday. Seriously, if you're in the area and want to hang out, give us a call. We'll also be back in NY in 2 weeks.
****Note Again - Wednesday morning we woke up at 8 to start the day. Wednesday night number 1 we woke up super early to get to the fish market. 3 hours of sleep. Wednesday night # 2 I managed about 45 minutes on the plane. It is now 11:30 AM Tokyo time on Friday. So in the last 51 and a half hours, I've gotten less than 4 hours of sleep. This is just a means of explanation of any unusually high level of length and incoherence of this post. *******
No comments:
Post a Comment