All creatures great and small
Greetings from Tokyo!
After a quiet start to our stay in the capital, we took a trip to the edge of city today to visit two very different districts.
In the morning we headed out to Tsukiji, famous for its legendary fish market, but not before Lucinda found her head turned by some taiyaki. We've already mentioned taiyaki a couple of times on this blog so it's probably a good time to let you know that Luce is addicted to these little fish-shaped pancakes. I might have to google "taiyaki rehab" when we get home.
Today's hit consisted of one with cream, one with maple butter, both quite soft compared to the crispy ones we had in Kyoto but extra fluffy. Thumbs up from the missus.
Speaking of her ladyship, she had a hygienic face mask on for most of the day as she's not a great fan of being spluttered on, which has happened a couple of times - mostly in food markets. They're big advocates of the old face mask here, as anyone who's watched a telly show on Japan will notice. Turns out the reason behind it is that the other half of the population don't cover their gobs when they cough.
Despite looking a bit more like the natives, we're not riding the Tokyo metro like them. It took us ages this morning to get to the right station in order to pick up our three day tourists' subway pass and then everything that could go wrong on the way to Tsukiji, did. We got off the train too soon, took the wrong turn a bunch of times, and generally darted about like headless chickens.
The bright side of this is that we worked up an appetite, so were even more ready to get torn into some street food.
We started off with a simple tamagoyaki (rolled egg omelette). Last time I tried one at the market it had a strong dashi (fish stock) flavour which I wasn't keen on, but this one was straight up sweet eggy weggy goodness.
Another favourite from last year was the crispy panko-breaded Matsuzaka beef cutlet. We managed to demolish one beef, and one beef and pork, cutlet each, all of which were unbelievably juicy and delicious.
Next, we went a bit more adventurous, pairing a fish cake and sweetcorn skewer with an okonomi-age (octopus, shrimp, cabbage and egg) one, both drizzled with takoyaki sauce.
Lucinda fancied some mochi (sweet rice cake) and found a stall which sold a warabi, matcha, and black sesame trio.
It's not all about the street food at Tsukiji - they also had some interesting fruit and vegetables. Alongside the usual expensive luxury fruits, we noticed Kevin and his happy little family of giant red carrots bundled together.
Having already eaten our way through most of the fish market and not tried any fish yet, it seemed wrong to leave without dipping our toes in the fishy water. We spotted a kindly old lady selling very reasonable little tubs of fresh tuna, which we splashed with soy sauce and topped with wasabi as she gave us instructions. She was a great laugh and seemed delighted that we enjoyed it so much.
With Tsukiji well and truly done, we caught the Yurikamome Line, a monorail loop which runs from Shimbashi to Odaiba.
Odaiba is a man-made island which was developed solely as an entertainment hotspot for the people of Tokyo, featuring shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, concert venues and arcades.
First stop was an Australian brunch diner called Bills which has branches around the world. We'd been here last year and loved their ricotta hot cakes, so had to come back and try them again. I've been making them occasionally for breakfast since and Lucinda says mine are better. Sorry Bill!
We'd spotted a few different places to visit during the day, one of which was a free museum all about Tokyo's sewerage system, but we couldn't find it. Maybe it was underground, maybe it got flushed away, who knows.
We did, however, see a sign nearby in Japanese kanji script with a picture of what is clearly a deadly black widow spider.
Like when you watch a horror movie and suddenly feel itchy, Lucinda started convulsing in the middle of the street telling me there was something in her tights. I had one of those helpless, useless husband moments where you can't exactly do much, other than calm the situation and insist it's unlikely to be a highly venomous arachnid causing the bother.
Unfortunately that wasn't enough reassurance, so we had no option other than to duck into a nearby car park and, er, inspect the tights for eight-legged visitors. Fortunately we discovered it was just the tag from her skirt, not the itsy-bitsy spider climbing up the ladder in her tights.
Just when we thought the panic was over, we noticed a CCTV camera had watched the whole episode! I dread to think what Japan thinks of us.
To ease the embarrassment, we nipped around the corner to look at some cars. I'd noticed the sign for the McLaren Tokyo technology centre so we had a wee nosey around that, and also checked out some tasty Alfa Romeos in the Fiat showroom next door.
Our next destination in Odaiba was the teamLab Borderless exhibition at the Mori Digital Art Museum. This is one I was swithering over when we planned the holiday as it seemed quite pricey for what it was.
The whole thing is meant to be a living, breathing digital ecosystem. Every room flows into the next and is constantly changing throughout the day, based on interactions with visitors, random events and suchlike. You can poke your head into the same room at two points in the day and it'll look totally different.
Each area has things you can interact with, whether it's standing in a waterfall, bothering a whale, chucking some leaves into the air, climbing coloured trees or bopping your way through a room full of giant illuminated balloons.
We both enjoyed bouncing on a giant trampoline, which caused planets to explode beneath us. As a 33 year old with no intention of growing up any time soon, I also quite liked going down the big slide as a green snail trail appeared behind me.
My favourite bit was their Christmas town, which had lots of different vehicles and buildings, all hand-drawn by visitors. You pick the template you want and colour it in with various crayons, then hand it proudly to the nice lady at the door who scans it magically into the town - very cool for kids, or big goofy babies like myself.
I decided to sketch the Stranraer FC bus, and watched on with absolute joy as it chugged its way through the winter wonderland with all the other poorly-scribbled motors.
Clearly there's a lot of fun to be had, but at times it was hard to find it because the whole thing lacked a bit of structure.
It was confusing to navigate between the areas, and quite often you'd go into the same place twice and wonder how to get to the next bit. Sometimes the staff were too fussy or rushed you through, other times they'd not explain things, get details wrong or totally contradict each other. This kind of patchy customer service seems so rare in Japan, it actually sticks out like a sore thumb.
There seemed to be a theme that human actions have consequences on the natural world, but this would be emphasised in some areas and not in others.
In the first section, a butterfly appeared for every new visitor. If anyone stepped on it, the butterfly disappeared and never came back. When you reached the forest and trampled on snakes (which I did, a lot), they made a splat, but came came back to life.
I realise I'm overthinking this but if it wasn't meant to be an art installation, or it was a bit cheaper, you could have a lot more fun with it and none of these details would really matter. As it was, it took itself a bit too seriously, didn't completely satisfy us, and would probably be best recommended to either kids, or social media influencers with lip fillers and fake tan who want to get cool selfies.
We finished off our island visit with a stroll by the water, enjoying the great views out across Tokyo Bay towards the Rainbow Bridge.
Back in the city, we nipped into the hotel to put our feet up for half an hour before submerging our faces in a bowl of thick, spicy dandan ramen from Ippudo, just five minutes round the corner.
Lucinda will be checking in tomorrow to describe all the nonsense we get up to exploring the crazy twin districts of Harajuku and Shibuya.
クモ
After a quiet start to our stay in the capital, we took a trip to the edge of city today to visit two very different districts.
In the morning we headed out to Tsukiji, famous for its legendary fish market, but not before Lucinda found her head turned by some taiyaki. We've already mentioned taiyaki a couple of times on this blog so it's probably a good time to let you know that Luce is addicted to these little fish-shaped pancakes. I might have to google "taiyaki rehab" when we get home.
Today's hit consisted of one with cream, one with maple butter, both quite soft compared to the crispy ones we had in Kyoto but extra fluffy. Thumbs up from the missus.
Speaking of her ladyship, she had a hygienic face mask on for most of the day as she's not a great fan of being spluttered on, which has happened a couple of times - mostly in food markets. They're big advocates of the old face mask here, as anyone who's watched a telly show on Japan will notice. Turns out the reason behind it is that the other half of the population don't cover their gobs when they cough.
Despite looking a bit more like the natives, we're not riding the Tokyo metro like them. It took us ages this morning to get to the right station in order to pick up our three day tourists' subway pass and then everything that could go wrong on the way to Tsukiji, did. We got off the train too soon, took the wrong turn a bunch of times, and generally darted about like headless chickens.
The bright side of this is that we worked up an appetite, so were even more ready to get torn into some street food.
We started off with a simple tamagoyaki (rolled egg omelette). Last time I tried one at the market it had a strong dashi (fish stock) flavour which I wasn't keen on, but this one was straight up sweet eggy weggy goodness.
Another favourite from last year was the crispy panko-breaded Matsuzaka beef cutlet. We managed to demolish one beef, and one beef and pork, cutlet each, all of which were unbelievably juicy and delicious.
Next, we went a bit more adventurous, pairing a fish cake and sweetcorn skewer with an okonomi-age (octopus, shrimp, cabbage and egg) one, both drizzled with takoyaki sauce.
Lucinda fancied some mochi (sweet rice cake) and found a stall which sold a warabi, matcha, and black sesame trio.
It's not all about the street food at Tsukiji - they also had some interesting fruit and vegetables. Alongside the usual expensive luxury fruits, we noticed Kevin and his happy little family of giant red carrots bundled together.
Having already eaten our way through most of the fish market and not tried any fish yet, it seemed wrong to leave without dipping our toes in the fishy water. We spotted a kindly old lady selling very reasonable little tubs of fresh tuna, which we splashed with soy sauce and topped with wasabi as she gave us instructions. She was a great laugh and seemed delighted that we enjoyed it so much.
With Tsukiji well and truly done, we caught the Yurikamome Line, a monorail loop which runs from Shimbashi to Odaiba.
Odaiba is a man-made island which was developed solely as an entertainment hotspot for the people of Tokyo, featuring shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, concert venues and arcades.
First stop was an Australian brunch diner called Bills which has branches around the world. We'd been here last year and loved their ricotta hot cakes, so had to come back and try them again. I've been making them occasionally for breakfast since and Lucinda says mine are better. Sorry Bill!
We'd spotted a few different places to visit during the day, one of which was a free museum all about Tokyo's sewerage system, but we couldn't find it. Maybe it was underground, maybe it got flushed away, who knows.
We did, however, see a sign nearby in Japanese kanji script with a picture of what is clearly a deadly black widow spider.
Like when you watch a horror movie and suddenly feel itchy, Lucinda started convulsing in the middle of the street telling me there was something in her tights. I had one of those helpless, useless husband moments where you can't exactly do much, other than calm the situation and insist it's unlikely to be a highly venomous arachnid causing the bother.
Unfortunately that wasn't enough reassurance, so we had no option other than to duck into a nearby car park and, er, inspect the tights for eight-legged visitors. Fortunately we discovered it was just the tag from her skirt, not the itsy-bitsy spider climbing up the ladder in her tights.
Just when we thought the panic was over, we noticed a CCTV camera had watched the whole episode! I dread to think what Japan thinks of us.
To ease the embarrassment, we nipped around the corner to look at some cars. I'd noticed the sign for the McLaren Tokyo technology centre so we had a wee nosey around that, and also checked out some tasty Alfa Romeos in the Fiat showroom next door.
Our next destination in Odaiba was the teamLab Borderless exhibition at the Mori Digital Art Museum. This is one I was swithering over when we planned the holiday as it seemed quite pricey for what it was.
The whole thing is meant to be a living, breathing digital ecosystem. Every room flows into the next and is constantly changing throughout the day, based on interactions with visitors, random events and suchlike. You can poke your head into the same room at two points in the day and it'll look totally different.
Each area has things you can interact with, whether it's standing in a waterfall, bothering a whale, chucking some leaves into the air, climbing coloured trees or bopping your way through a room full of giant illuminated balloons.
We both enjoyed bouncing on a giant trampoline, which caused planets to explode beneath us. As a 33 year old with no intention of growing up any time soon, I also quite liked going down the big slide as a green snail trail appeared behind me.
My favourite bit was their Christmas town, which had lots of different vehicles and buildings, all hand-drawn by visitors. You pick the template you want and colour it in with various crayons, then hand it proudly to the nice lady at the door who scans it magically into the town - very cool for kids, or big goofy babies like myself.
I decided to sketch the Stranraer FC bus, and watched on with absolute joy as it chugged its way through the winter wonderland with all the other poorly-scribbled motors.
Clearly there's a lot of fun to be had, but at times it was hard to find it because the whole thing lacked a bit of structure.
It was confusing to navigate between the areas, and quite often you'd go into the same place twice and wonder how to get to the next bit. Sometimes the staff were too fussy or rushed you through, other times they'd not explain things, get details wrong or totally contradict each other. This kind of patchy customer service seems so rare in Japan, it actually sticks out like a sore thumb.
There seemed to be a theme that human actions have consequences on the natural world, but this would be emphasised in some areas and not in others.
In the first section, a butterfly appeared for every new visitor. If anyone stepped on it, the butterfly disappeared and never came back. When you reached the forest and trampled on snakes (which I did, a lot), they made a splat, but came came back to life.
I realise I'm overthinking this but if it wasn't meant to be an art installation, or it was a bit cheaper, you could have a lot more fun with it and none of these details would really matter. As it was, it took itself a bit too seriously, didn't completely satisfy us, and would probably be best recommended to either kids, or social media influencers with lip fillers and fake tan who want to get cool selfies.
We finished off our island visit with a stroll by the water, enjoying the great views out across Tokyo Bay towards the Rainbow Bridge.
Back in the city, we nipped into the hotel to put our feet up for half an hour before submerging our faces in a bowl of thick, spicy dandan ramen from Ippudo, just five minutes round the corner.
Lucinda will be checking in tomorrow to describe all the nonsense we get up to exploring the crazy twin districts of Harajuku and Shibuya.
クモ
George
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