June 26 Weekend

This weekend we decided to check out two pretty popular areas of Tokyo: Asakusa and Ginza. Prior to that though I had to finish up my final piece of relocation business by going to the Chiyoda Ku ward office and get my Alien Registration Card or gaijin (foreigner) card as they call it here.

After picking up my card, which will allow me to travel in and out of Japan during my stay, we headed to the Ginza train like. Asakusa is the last stop on the Ginza line, and there is an old Temple there. I think perhaps we never made it to the proper shrine, however. We were consumed by a sea of people and what I would consider trinket shops that were all located through a large gate. It was an interesting time, reminded me of another one of those places where the shops are selling what they believe tourists want - similar to the "Shell and Fruit Shops" along Florida's highways. So aside from not being too big of a fan of those type of places we made the best of it. We walked around quite a bit, found an interesting antique museum and finally had another Japanese right-of-passage; I ate at McDonalds. McDonalds are a step up in terms of cleanliness and decor in Japan, and their speciality is the Teriyaki Burger. I took it up a notch and had the teriyaki and egg burger. It was pretty darn good, except there was too much sauce on it; half the sauce it would have been perfect. So I can cross that one off the list, perhaps the next one I will have will be a quick one at Narita airport back to the U.S. - but not before then.

Next day we checked out Ginza, another high end area around Tokyo. What a great time! Lots of people, great food, amazing vibe, astonishing stores. Ginza, from a shopping perspective, I'd say trumps magnificent mile without too much trouble. Any time DeBeers, Cartier, Prada, etc. have their own multi-story buildings, you know you're in a unique place. So we walked around that for quite awhile and then had a very unique dining experience. We had a Chinese pot dinner - the basic premise is a large bowl, two different soups in that bowl seperated by a divider, then a variety of meats, vegetables, mushrooms, etc. dumped in and cooked at the table. You then spoon out some soup, and pull the different bits that you'd like to eat out of the pot with chopsticks. We had about 6-7 different kind of mushrooms, pork, fish, potato, etc - a great variety. I'd say the more odd item that I had was a slide of horse tartar - yep basically raw horse meat. Like most exotic meats - they are exactly what you expect, a decently gamey taste, and a bit tougher than you'd want in a larger quantity serving. So, you appreciate it for what it is, and move on. A few other highlights of the trip to Ginza: We purchased an excellent German dessert cake to take home - baum kuchen, we hung out in the Nissan gallery which had the new all-electric Leaf and a rather Star Wars Death Star-feel exploration area, then finally we saw a wedding vehicle procession which  consisted of large escelades, navigators, and H2 hummers with vinyl signs on the sides which read "it's An American Style Wedding". Yep, thanks MTV+Hip Hop, way to drag our image down with an anchor...

It was a great weekend, which led into probably the most intense work week yet - hene the lateness in the post.