Tokyo Day 3

A bad night.  Awake at 2.00am and only fitful sleep after that.  Peter the same.  Jet lag!   For breakfast I threw caution to the wind and had scrambled eggs with noodles followed by salad and miso soup with seaweed.  Peter stuck to cereal, scrambled eggs and sausages and toast.

Asakusa district

Shopping arcades near the shrine

Brush shop

Outside it was raining even harder than the day before.   We scurried to the metro and took the Ginza line to Asakusa and explored the district.  Full of little shops and alley ways and, thankfully, some covered arcades.  We glimpsed the pagoda and the shrine but it was really too wet to do anything other that hurry along.  We found a building housing crafts and enjoyed looking at the wares.   In a kitchen shop we bought a very interesting apron.  I thought I might copy the design and make some.  There was a great array of regional foods for sale, but few of them labelled in English so we refrained.   We were amused by the shops selling plastic food.  I took a photograph of a mammoth hamburger stack and a pile of pancakes.

Any sauce with that? 

Plastic pancakes

Then we slopped our way towards Kappabashi Street which is lined with kitchen ware shops catering to the restaurant trade.  I bought a kitchen knife and a pair of kitchen tongs.  We also discovered the tax rebate shop which actually returns the tax you have paid in cash.

Lunch stop with paraffin heater

My lunch

Then it was time to find some lunch and we chanced on this little restaurant run by two little old ladies in aprons and head scarves.   The menu in Japanese was on the walls and we had to point to the plastic replicas outside.   I had a bowl of rice with sweet onions topped with fried pork, served with green tea and kimchi.   Peter had two little fried fish with their tails sticking out.  No English was spoken in acquiring and paying for this meal, just a lot of smiling.

The rickshaw men were getting very wet

Still raining hard after lunch so we headed back to the metro and got off at a large and very expensive department store.  Masses of interesting things in the food hall, and entire hall of sweets and eye-waveringly expensive men's wear.  Peter did not buy anything.  We found a nice presentation bag for a gift we have for our Japanese friends and eventually found our way back to the start and a coffee shop.    Then back to the hotel for a well-earned rest.

It's a shame the weather is preventing us from enjoying some of the parks and gardens we can see on the maps.

Our Japanese friends collected us by taxi at 6.00 and we went to a restaurant called Gonpachi Nishiazabu.  Apparently, a set for the Quentin Tarantino film 'Kill Bill' was modelled on the inside of the restaurant.   President George Bush ate there with the Japanese prime minister of the day.   It all adds up to quite a tourist attraction and the restaurant was full of non-Japanese.  Our friends had never been there before.   The meal was a succession of small plates, some of them not very interesting and, for the price, it was rather disappointing.   We only drank beer and a small cup of sake and the bill came to £60 a head.  We had to take our shoes off before we sat down at the table which had a well underneath for our feet.  Although the pictures look as though we are seated on chairs, we were perched on hard benches.  It was a devil to get in and out of.  I was give wooden flip flops to wear to go to the toilet and nearly fell off them twice!  Strangely the toilet floor was covered in bumpy stones which didn't help!   Mits and Haru went off for their metro and we walked home from the restaurant and were back in the hotel before 9.00pm.  Mits and Haru are lovely people and we enjoyed our evening with them, if not the food.   Peter is about to do some research for supper tomorrow night.  

Mits and Haru

The four of us

The restaurant from the balcony