Tokyo Day 2 - Chuo, Japan
Chuo, Japan
Well, I must admit I am falling in love with this city. It is clean, there is not a piece of garbage anywhere to be found and so orderly and polite. The people are very friendly as well and have played a big part in helping us figure out how to get around. Today we went on the following adventures. 1) Tokyo Fish Market This was a really cool and unique experience. We heard it was on the "must do" list of activities in Japan so we decided to go explore. To get to the fish market, you need to wake up at 3 am so this worked out well with our jet lag. Our taxi driver dropped us off and we were lost in a wave of activity - people driving mini forklift looking machines were whizzing around delivering the latest catch. We ended up getting so lost that a nice guy driving one of those machines told us to hop on the back of his truck and zipped us right to where we needed to be. Once there you watch a presentation about safety and then they take you to the live auction. It was freezing cold inside and there was a variety of different fish. The workers would inspect the fish and then the auction would begin. We got to watch for about 40 minutes and then the second group came in. They only let 120 people in a day so it was good we got to experience it. Afterwards we walked around the restaurant and produce area and really enjoyed seeing all the sushi restaurants making breakfast with the fresh fish. 2) Imperial palace The imperial palace is located in the heart of the city and is where the current emperor and his family live. It is a massive place complete with gardens, moats and a koi pond. Again, the Japanese are not ornate - their style is simple yet still very regal. It was a hot day but we managed to walk the entire grounds and see most of the very well manicured gardens. http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3017.html 3) MOMAT Tom was a really good sport and let me stop in at the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. There was a special exhibit of the Japanese artist, Takeuchi Seiho. He was trained by the Kyoto school but started to incorporate some western techniques. One of first differences you'll notice is it was traditional for Japanese artists to paint screens (what we call room dividers). The subject matter is interesting as well as, at least for this exhibition, it was mainly animals, particularly tigers, monkeys, cats. I'll write a separate post going into more detail on this as I found it fascinating. 4) Akihabara We made a stop to area that specializes in all things electronics. Imagine if Best Buy, the Apple store and Radio Shack all decided to take up the same block. It was massive though, almost like the Times Square of electronics, games and toys. We were hunting around for electronic trains for Tom - trying to find a Shinkasen (Japanese bullet train) model. Tom was in heaven and ended up finding a store just dedicated to selling various train models. http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3003.html 5) Cat Cafe One of the best parts of Tokyo is the uniqueness. It reminds me a little bit of Austin in that way, where they could probably also adopt something close to the "Keep Austin weird" slogan. We happened to stumble upon a cat cafe, which I was dying to check out. It is exactly what the name suggests - you dine with feline friends. There were about 7 friendly cats at this cafe and we ordered drinks and got to play with cats as a side perk! 6) Asakusa We were feeling FOMO (fear of missing out) so we decided to squeeze in one more stop. We stopped in at Asakusa, which felt like it was meant to be more of the traditional Japanese culture. This is the location of the Japanese sky tree as well as the Senso-ji Temple and Hozo-mon gate. They had a lot of stalls set up with little shops so we also did some browsing/shopping. By the time we made a loop our feet were really starting to hurt (I would venture to guess we might have walked 6 miles) so we made our way home to get ready for the baseball game. 7) Tokyo Dome - Giants game We went to check out a baseball game! Tom's boss gave us free tickets and we were really excited to check it out. The Dome is a massive indoor arena and the fans were pretty passionate. There were a lot of similarities to American stadiums - hot dogs, beer and popcorn and some differences - there were bento boxes and Japanese food also for sale. All in all it was a really cool thing to check out.