Erica & Todd go to Japan! Day 2: Thursday, Tokyo

First real day here. We woke up early and went to the fish market. Totally amazing place, although Erica said that it reminded her of an old English poem about "the rape of the sea"... Crazy place and almost got run over by tons of these little motorized carts; you'll see them in the photo gallery. Also, people smoke in the market. Gross. Ate the most awesome sushi at one of the tiny restaurants nearby. Turns out that it's the one that Todd English featured in his show. The staff was amused at Erica's Japanese speaking. In fact, that's a theme throughout the trip. She's pulling it off quite well, but they are clearly more used to foreigners like me who can barely speak their own native language... :) In any case, though fairly expensive, the sushi was most excellent, and the pieces of fish were HUGE in comparison to what one usually gets in the states.

We walked around Ginza; very interesting, although not a lot to do except people watch and shop. People ride their bikes on the sidewalk and don't wear helmets. Some people use bells, but not everyone, which made things a little dicey to walk around when it was crowded. There are vending machines everywhere: mostly drinks, some smokes, no food. Sadly though, most of the machines had the same sorts of stuff in them.

The Sony store was kinda interesting. No super duper tiny laptops except the UMPC tablet-y one. And that's too small for regular daily use... They did have a ton of cameras and TVs and all that. We didn't make it up to the Aibo floor though.

Walked around the Imperial Palace grounds. Beautiful architecture, but you can't go in the grounds- proper. Also, strangely not a Japanese stlye garden. None of the buildings are open to the public. Advise to skip. Across from the main gate though, there's a sweet park, which if it's a nice day, would be a lovely place to nap. There's also a "water park" nearby, which in this case means an open courtyard w/ cool fountains. They had even hired a dude to sweep out the bottoms of the fountains. Nifty!

Ate dinner at a crappy chinese place near the hotel. AMPM is our friend though and saved us. We love AMPM. Also, 'Dars' may be the cheapest, best dark chocolate out there. We love Dars.

I've noticed that things are packaged beautifully here, the more so the higher the pricepoint. If you but a $5 box of sweets from a shop (and it's a step up from a convenience store), the clerk will wrap it up neatly and quickly into a little gift for you. :)

Pooped out earlish due to poor sleeping and jet lag.


Here are photos from the fish market.