Here’s me!
I never figured I’d make it onto a photo proper but I guess that’s the advantage of being one of the tallest guys in the moshpit.
You ROCK J!! Akasaka Blitz! Wooooo!!
(Thanks to my dearest iBon for spotting me… ^^)
I tried natto today, something which I had always wanted to try but never had the chance to. Basically it’s fermented soya beans, and it has this extremely sticky and gooey slime surrounding it.
I find that it smells like 5 day old socks, and tastes like the laundry water used to wash said socks.
Yet another quake last night at 520am. This time it was scarier.
6.6 on the Richter scale this time, but a 4 on the Shindo scale. The hotel room was moving from side to side, and the sound from the rumbling ground and building was humbling. The room shook for what seemed like a good 15 seconds (although at that time it felt like 3 minutes). I was genuinely scared this time for the duration of the quake.
With my luck with quakes recently, I’m expecting an attack from Godzilla today to make my Tokyo trip complete.
It’s been raining buckets in Tokyo and nothing chases the rainy blues away better than a steaming hot bowl of ramen.
Lunch was at Ichiran, which serves really nice ramen in a strange setting. First, you buy a ticket for a bowl of ramen from a vending machine outside the shop. After which you fill up an order form, indicating various preferences for your ramen like thickness of soup, firmness of noodles and if you want their “secret sauce” or not. After which, you go sit in a booth all by yourself, and wait. A pair of mysteious hands will appear with your order of ramen and pass it to you below the red curtain. It’s all very interesting, as from start to finish, you more or less don’t have to even see or interact with a single human being. Their Japanese website has a good video illustrating this process.
If you drink up all your soup, the words at the bottom of the bowl say something like “The last drop of soup, is the one enjoyed best”.
My first earthquake today! :)
We were in Shibuya grabbing dinner at First Kitchen when the ground started to tremble. The lights started shaking and everyone kind of looked around at each other and whispered… “earthquake..?” The experience was kind of surreal as it was my very first earthquake experience, but I’m stoked to have gone through it. I’ll always remember First Kitchen and the vegetable pasta I had. The earthquake was 6.9 on the Richter scale somewhere off Tokyo, and the magnitude in Shibuya was reported as magnitude 3 on the Shindo scale.
Being a day of “firsts”, I visited my first Apple Store! :)
Thank you Shibyua for making my first day here utterly memorable.
Tamafuji in Sapporo serves kickass tonkatsu.
Any shop that takes their tonkatsu seriously enough to make their own breadcrumbs has my vote for being awesome.
We discovered Japanese muruku today.
Stopped by a roadside soba shop in Biei called Tsuruki and grabbed a lunch of homemade sesame soba noodles.
At the counter we noticed them selling this deep fried soba noodles with salt. They taste great, and remind me of muruku!
I finally managed to try Suntory Boss Coffee Rainbow Mountain Blend, which I had been wanting to try for the longest time since I saw the whole series of Tommy Lee Jones Rainbow Boss coffee ads (link opens first ad in the series of more than 15 plus ads).
Here’s my favourite ad from the entire series. I find these lines from this ad particularly meaningful: “The people on this planet build a bridge if there is a river, and dig a tunnel if there is a mountain. If they find burden, they try to overcome it. I wonder where they are trying to go.”
Incidentally, the coffee is yummy. Fragrantly bitter and not too sweet. It made me feel like Alien Jones for an instant, and for that, it was all worth it. :) Frostie liked it too.
My first attempt to open an Onigiri purchased at Sankus convenience store (Sapporo) for my brekkie this morning.
Do note that this is a NEGATIVE demonstration on how to open an onigiri from a convenience store. The seaweed is supposed to remain ON THE ONIGIRI at the end.
The onigiri, was delicious…. :)
