Japan, day 2 & 3 - small things and old worlds
Reposts continued...
Proceeding in order...
Day 2
Much of the day was spent visiting one of my wife's friends who came down from Sendai. We travelled out to Odaiba on the monorail from our lodgings in Ginza. Sidenote: we used airline points for this hotel, so it was relatively comfortable, but the room was tiny.
The Odaiba monorail passes by Tokyo Big Sight, home of Comiket, which you might recognise from its distinctive shape. I don't know what the saw is about.
We had originally planned to go to a giant onsen building in the city with a buffet, but circumstances forced us to change plans somewhat and we ended up going to a minatures museum called Small World with an interesting tie-in exhibit.
Hmmm.
Eva Rebuild movie 3 apparently used a miniature set to plan out its shots - the model village was on display, along with a few other scenes.
It was a pretty fun place, sort of like a Lego World crossed with a bit of Katamari. There was a space centre, an airport, all sorts of things.
Lunch was a parfait at the attached cafeteria then an upscale counter sushi place. It feels like most of the old kaitenzushi places have been replaced by counter sushi - even the chain store Hamazushi has moved to a order-and-serve model, some say because of Covid.
In the afternoon we went to the Ikebukuro Pokemon centre to meet one of my friends. I grabbed a handful of things, but nothing particularly noteworthy this time around. (I already got a Substitute doll years ago - it was nowhere near this big or expensive though).
There was a very cute Rowlett statue nearby, though.
Dinner with my friend was an unagi-don restaurant that had the most monsterously huge unagi-don we'd ever seen. About 3,700y for this monster - we split it between two.
The fluffy stuff in the middle is a relatively tasteless tamagoyaki, not a giant slab of butter as I initially thought. The unagi made up for it though.
Day 3
The morning was spent wandering around the crowded Tsukiji outer markets - not at the crack of dawn, thankfully - just buying and eating anything that took our fancy, since it's mostly catered towards street food. They jack up the prices a lot, though, so it's not worth it from a price POV - but it's a fun experience.
Generally, there were only a few types of shops that repeated: outdoor BBQ, standing sashimi bar, etc. They were all uniformly delicious though.
Having raw oysters and sashimi at like 8 in the morning is extremely luxurious.
We had to rush a bit as we needed to catch a connection to a place out in Chiba called Bosa no Mura Open Air Museum, a historical recreation of a rural village during the Edo era (I think). It was a huge pain to get to, mainly because I missed a transfer and we nearly ended up in Ibaraki before I realised. Bus services get spottier the further out you get, too - miss one and you're waiting for an hour.
You can rent costumes to wander around the village in. I would be lying if I said dressing like a samurai with a sword to rest your hand on the hilt wasn't extremely satisfying.
I didn't really take a lot of interesting pictures in this place, but here is a scarecrow.
It was fairly interesting, but definitely pitched mostly at domestic tourists - almost no English explanations whatsoever, though there were a fair few live demonstration/workshop sort of things like swordmaking, weaving, rice harvesting etc. We muddled through (surprisingly I could understand a decent amount of explanation about how rice threshing used to work, possibly from some of the more rural manga I was reading).
When we got back, we wandered around Ginza looking for basic chain kaitenzushi, but even the basic chains like Sushiro etc had lines out the door, mostly of tourists (though they were in a Uniqlo and a Bic Camera right next to the station). In the end we settled for a cheap but filling Yoshinoya teishoku of sukiyaki.