A Day of Firsts
This day was more of a tourist type day. Marina, Yuko, Nori, Lisa and I went to a sort of place that might remind you of the old city in Philadelphia - but way older. This place is a former castle town called Kawagoe or "Little Edo" (Edo being Tokyo's original name) the streets are lined with "kurazukuri" which are big, japanese style warehouse buildings and storefronts. Some of these buildings date back really far. There are a ton of pictures for this place because I couldn't really describe the buildings if I tried. All of them are in traditional Japanese architecture with the layered windows and the Japanese style roofs and stuff. But, pictures are required for a full understanding of what I mean. Seriously, go on google and check this architecture out. It's pretty cool.
While we were there, there were two new things that I tried that I hadn't done before : I had some ice cream that was made from sweet potatoes, there are pictures of this on the flickr site.. that stuff tastes amazing. According to the lady who was selling it, it got five stars on some internet food rating site. That was their big selling point. This was located in a winding little alley called Okashi Yokochō or 'Candy Alley'. Everything there looked tasty, but this was all we had time for.
The second thing I tried was a human powered cart -or rickshaw. The guy who pulled us around was pretty cool, although I'm not sure he was used to carrying a fat American guy like me around. He seemed pretty tired. He took us around to some old buildings and shops that had been there for hundreds of years, and then he brought us over to a shop where (what he said) a famous dog was. The owner of the dog let us take a picture with him but neither one of us (Marina and I) could figure out why in the hell this dog was famous. Oh well, it was a cute dog.
The dog was as confused as we were, I think.
After we left the old city area, we went to some big marketplace type thing that was real modern looking. It looked like there were stores for miles on this one street (which probably isn't far from the truth..) with a lot of Japanese signs. A majority of the shops were what you'd imagine... a lot of t-shirt places, convenience stores, a glasses store where Marina got some new glasses, department stores (where the Eguchi ladies got some umbrellas) and a musical instrument store about the size of George's Music back in Philadelphia. No display stuff that I could play, though... that was a bummer.
(I'm a drummer and I miss my drum set!)
We made our way to a department store to pick a kind of "theme" for Marina's room. This was generally like any Target in the states, but way bigger. When we were done, I figured we were headed back home, but instead we stopped somewhere. This would become my first experience with conveyor belt (kaiten) sushi. Basically the idea is certain plates cost a certain amount of money, and when it goes by on the conveyor belt you grab what you want and you share it with the table. This wouldn't work in America with American foods because Americans are too fat and it would cost 9 million dollars every time you wanted to go out because someone would be eating everything on the belt before anyone else at the other tables could get any. Anyway, the food was great and I tried Salmon egg sushi for the first time. That was pretty good, although you don't really want to eat more than like.. three rolls of that stuff. You start to really think about what you're eating and then you get a sick feeling.
My chopstick skills are slowly getting better!
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