Tokyo: Friday, 11/8
The meds are helping already. The difference in how I feel between yesterday and today is remarkable. Thank goodness.
For our final full day, we decided to go to a museum--have to do at least one, right? We went to the National Art Center and chose an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art. It was as inscrutable and mystifying as most contemporary art is to me. The girls liked a video of a Japanese family in Okinawa, part of which involved a pitch-dark viewing room with only the sound of galloping horses. Who knows what it meant.
Next we took a city bus to Shinjuku, a neighborhood that just seems quintessentially Tokyo: tall buildings covered in neon and video screens, everything playing music or making sounds. We shopped at a Muji and an eclectic store called Tokyo Hands.
We had conveyor-belt sushi for lunch. Unfortunately, the novelty of selecting small plates from a conveyor belt did not hide the sheer hideousness of many of the dishes--lots of orange salmon eggs (small and large), “soft roe” (which looked undeniably like brains), a pile of teensy baby eel-like fish on rice (shudder), and more. The girls barely ate anything. Though they like sushi in the US, they were shocked and appalled to discover that sushi is actually raw fish (how did they manage to not know this??). “THIS FISH IS RAW???? YOU MEAN, IT’S NOT COOKED????” they exclaimed. Hopefully no one understood them.
We searched for, and ultimately found with the help of a friendly stranger, the Shinjuku Gyoen park, which was beautiful. There was a big display of painstakingly cultivated chrysanthemums.
We wandered a bit around Shinjuku after that and stumbled on a bustling outdoor market--tons of food stalls on several streets--that all led to a big shrine. It was packed with people all waiting to go inside. Was it a festival? A typical Friday night? We’ll never know. We looked at all the different foods, and L&G each got a kind of pancake sandwich with chocolate in the middle.
Our final stop: a hundred-yen store. We all bought a few things. The kids are obsessed with take-apart food erasers and have been collecting them all week. The store was underground, in a train station--Andrew’s GPS told us we were standing in the store when we were still out on the street. Tokyo is not the easiest city to navigate, with as many things below and high above ground as at ground level.
We passed yet another hundred-yen store as we walked to the subway. We also passed a big arcade full of claw machines. The girls insisted on trying one, despite our assurances that they wouldn’t get anything. (They didn’t get anything.)
Dinner was amazing, at another tiny ramen place in Akasaka called Kyushu Jangara. We sat at a counter. It was delicious.
And then it was time to pack up the room in preparation for our departure tomorrow. None of us are ready to leave.
For our final full day, we decided to go to a museum--have to do at least one, right? We went to the National Art Center and chose an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art. It was as inscrutable and mystifying as most contemporary art is to me. The girls liked a video of a Japanese family in Okinawa, part of which involved a pitch-dark viewing room with only the sound of galloping horses. Who knows what it meant.
Next we took a city bus to Shinjuku, a neighborhood that just seems quintessentially Tokyo: tall buildings covered in neon and video screens, everything playing music or making sounds. We shopped at a Muji and an eclectic store called Tokyo Hands.
We had conveyor-belt sushi for lunch. Unfortunately, the novelty of selecting small plates from a conveyor belt did not hide the sheer hideousness of many of the dishes--lots of orange salmon eggs (small and large), “soft roe” (which looked undeniably like brains), a pile of teensy baby eel-like fish on rice (shudder), and more. The girls barely ate anything. Though they like sushi in the US, they were shocked and appalled to discover that sushi is actually raw fish (how did they manage to not know this??). “THIS FISH IS RAW???? YOU MEAN, IT’S NOT COOKED????” they exclaimed. Hopefully no one understood them.
We searched for, and ultimately found with the help of a friendly stranger, the Shinjuku Gyoen park, which was beautiful. There was a big display of painstakingly cultivated chrysanthemums.
We wandered a bit around Shinjuku after that and stumbled on a bustling outdoor market--tons of food stalls on several streets--that all led to a big shrine. It was packed with people all waiting to go inside. Was it a festival? A typical Friday night? We’ll never know. We looked at all the different foods, and L&G each got a kind of pancake sandwich with chocolate in the middle.
Our final stop: a hundred-yen store. We all bought a few things. The kids are obsessed with take-apart food erasers and have been collecting them all week. The store was underground, in a train station--Andrew’s GPS told us we were standing in the store when we were still out on the street. Tokyo is not the easiest city to navigate, with as many things below and high above ground as at ground level.
We passed yet another hundred-yen store as we walked to the subway. We also passed a big arcade full of claw machines. The girls insisted on trying one, despite our assurances that they wouldn’t get anything. (They didn’t get anything.)
Dinner was amazing, at another tiny ramen place in Akasaka called Kyushu Jangara. We sat at a counter. It was delicious.
And then it was time to pack up the room in preparation for our departure tomorrow. None of us are ready to leave.
Comments