Japan, Day 3

Saturday, October 22, 2005

On Saturday, per my request, we “eased” ourselves into Tokyo.

John and I started our day at the hotel’s “American Buffet” where they served “typical” American breakfast food. We had hotdogs, steamed vegetables, lasagna and French fries along with cereal, fruit, bread, and boiled eggs. We also noticed that they had tomato juice there too. Weird.

Jim came to our hotel room around 11:00 and the 5 of us prepared to venture out and explore Shinjuku. We started out by learning the ropes of the train station and going 2 stops to Takeshita Dori where we walked through a beautiful park to the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Once there, we got to see a wedding party walking through as well as some little children dressed in ceremonial dress. Apparently, on significant birthdays, they get dressed up and get their picture taken at the Shrine.



On the way back from the Shrine, we stopped at a cafeteria in the park and had some Japanese fare.

After the Shrine, we went to Takeshita Street, which is known for it’s hip fashions and is the epicenter of Japanese teenagers.


On this route is my brother’s latest building, still under construction, so we stopped to take pictures of the structure. The leopard part is an all glass building that will house Cartier's store. Cartier put the leopard over the glass as an ad to say, "We're coming!". The structure in the back that looks like wood, is actually limestone. The entire building is very impressive.



After that, we went to an antique store that sold all sorts of tourist friendly goods like sake boxes and green tea sets. I noted that Jim probably gets our Christmas presents from this store, as many items looked oddly familiar. After antiqing, we pressed on to Kiddy Land, which is a 5 story building full of Japanese toys. This place was a blast and I'm sure you could see Mike drooling all the way in America. I picked up some miniature Japanese food in this store and John managed to find something close to his heart too.



That night, we met up with several of Jim’s friends for some “Italian” cuisine. The restaurant was located in the Japanese Opera House (which is really an enormous skyscraper). Jim thought we were going to a laid-back place, but we ended up in a very nice place complete with 3 course meal and a half of bottle of wine per person. The appetizer was a jelly with sausage and eggplant… sort of like an Italian Jello. The main course was pasta with black and green olives and red pepper. For dessert, we had cooked pomegranates with cinnamon and ginger with ice cream. Quite a good meal. After the restaurant, we met up with another friend, Sunoco, who informed me she was “so happy for the existence of Jim-san.” We then headed off to a traditional Japanese smokey bar for beer and sake. At the bar, we were served tofu with shredded fish, boiled soybeans in salt water (these were cool – they looked like pea pods and you just popped the soybeans out of the pods to eat them), dried manta ray, nato (this was gross – it was fermented soybeans with raw tuna), baked chicken, potatoes with cheese, and water lily roots. We were seated next to a group of drunk college guys that kept chanting in Japanese (one gulp! One gulp!) and then proceeding to down their sake. By the end of the night, one guy had taken off his shirt and another was drunkenly groping his friend. I think Mike and Haywood were quite intrigued by this.