Alia Luria

Well, I’m sorry that it’s been weeks since I’ve updated this site. I’ve had a one visitor after another, and the semester is winding down, which means a lot more projects and preparation for finals. As well, I’m also in the midst of preparing to depart Japan, as well.

I should write a few tidbits about the last month, however, so that you get some idea of what it’s been like.

Spring Break
For spring break, Amey and I traveled around Japan, visiting Kyoto, Nara, Himeji and Osaka. The trip was a blast, and I particularly loved Kyoto. I could have spent much more time there, and I’m really glad that I’ll have a chance to go back with David in May (even though it will be Golden Week, so travel will be very expensive). I ended up taking over 1,000 photos in March, so I have a ton up on Flickr. The temples in Kyoto were amazing, and the Japanese gardens were stunning. I think they were borderline my favorite part of the trip. It was like standing in a fairy land. Here are just a very few of the salient sights…

Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion)

Ginkaku-ji (Silver Pavilion), was under renovation

Eiken-do Temple – View of Kyoto

Todaiji Temple in Nara

Maiko Geisha Spotting!

Nijo Castle’s Garden

Imperial Palace Garden

Gion Corner Maiko Dance

Himeji Castle

And that’s kind of a shortcut to that…

Pacific Culture Workshop

The highlight of this workshop sponsored through the school was definitely getting to wear a kimono. The lady really had to rush to get me into it, and I was wearing a sweater and jeans, so it’s amazing how much bulk the kimonos will hide! I really loved the kimono and wanted to take it home with me!

Tokyo International Anime Convention 2008

Amey and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time at the anime convention, but I did manage to get a photo with Al from Fullmetal Alchemist!

I will have to do a whole entry on the sakura trees and plum blossoms, which were both gorgeous. Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) season in Japan is truly a great experience, and it is probably the most beautiful that Japan ever looks… with flowering trees everywhere. The weather has been so bad the last couple days that it’s possible that the trees are no longer blooming, but I managed to get a lot of photos of Ueno park and other trees. I will put some photographs up when I have some more time!

So, Hakone was a lot of fun. The group managed to cram a whole lot of experiences into two short days. I ended up with over 200 photos uploaded to Flickr! I’m not going to post all of them here, because… that would probably bore you. I think I will try to do one highlight from each experience.

You can check out my food gallery for all the food we ate on the trip, since I decided to start photographing my food. The gallery is here. I did get to try a lot of interesting new foods, including baked miso on a spoon, cold soba, whole fried fish, sweet tofu, plum wine, and other stuff. I highly recommend the plum wine! Yummy!

Our first stop (after the rest stop that had really good takoyaki) was the hotel. We had a soba lunch and meandered around for a bit before setting off to the Hakone Open Air Museum. We only got an hour at this museum, but it was really cool. It sculptures up on the mountain side, and the view was stunning. My favorite thing there was this stained glass tower, although I didn’t get a lot of great photos of it. Here is a photo of me on the roof of the tower.

View from the tower

I really wish we could have spent more time there. It was really pleasant, and a lot of the sculptures were interactive (although designed for kids mostly). Mixed in with weird, modern sculpture were pieces from famous sculptors such as Rodin. I kind of wish they had a Claes Oldenburg, but I guess it would have overpowered a lot of the other sculptures.

After we left the museum, we took a cable car ride up to Owakudani on the Hakone Ropeway. The view was pretty spectacular, and I even got some shots of Fuji-san out the window.

Out the window of the cable car

Fuji-san

This one above is the only shot from the cable car that didn’t have reflections on the glass. I have some wider shots from the top of Owakudani.

Once we arrived there, we had another hour or so to wander around. I spent so much time looking at fuji, that by the time I had gotten up to the spring area where the black eggs are sold, they had sold out up there! Not realizing that there were some at another station, Mani was nice enough to give a couple of us each one of his black eggs.

Black egg of doooooooom

It was pretty tasty… the sulfur doesn’t really seep into the egg at all. It just tastes like a super fresh boiled egg. After the egg, I decided to try egg-flavored ice cream… they will flavor ice cream with pretty much anything here! It was okay. It tasted like custard. I bummed another egg off of Patrick when we got back to the bus as well!

The view of this entire mountain and the springs was fabulous, especially with the steam rising out of the cracks in the surface. I highly recommend checking out my Hakone Trip set on Flickr to just skim the shots.

I want to post a nicer photo of Fuji-san here though. It was so massive that it truly eclipsed all the surrounding areas. The scale was unreal, and I don’t think these photos completely capture it.

Fuji-san and rail car cables

In the one above, you can see the cables for the rail cars that we rode up on.

I left Owakudani with great sadness, because it was really amazing. Our sight seeing was done for the day, but we still had a nice evening of food and onsen ahead of us.

After checking into the hotel, Carrie, Carly, and I decided to head immediately to the onsen so that we could get nice and relaxed for our dinner. We got dressed up in our yukata and proceeded to the onsen. I was REALLY glad I’d gone the night before, because I was able to properly put on my yukata and knew the procedure for onsen. I think Carrie and Carly were glad too. :) The photo below is of all in yukata.

The girls take a bath!

You can’t really see the yukata, because we were wearing haori, but they are really comfy. I am definitely going to buy at least one while I’m here. I think I will buy a cheaper lounging one, and then a really nice one that would be appropriate for a festival.

After the onsen was dinner. You can also check out the album for photos of the hotel room. I didn’t really get any photos of the grounds, and of course, I got none of the onsen either.

Dinner!

The dinner shot includes a personal shabu shabu portion on the left – pot for boiling, meat and veggies, dipping bowl, as well as a serving of tofu. On the right there is grilled fish and sashimi and soy sauce. In the center is a glass for beverage and a tiny cup of plum wine. The plum wine was really, good, but that was all that they would give us. After this initial food, they also bought out a whole fried fish, a soup similar to the one David and I had at ShabuZen, rice, and a sweet tofu and fruit desert and tea. There might have been other stuff as well, but I honestly don’t remember. It was a lot of food! And there was also an all-you-can drink menu, so some people had a good time and sang a bunch of karaoke. :) I refrained from singing this weekend though!

After dinner, everyone wanted to go out, but Hakone isn’t really a party town. So, we spent the evening hanging out in one of the rooms and playing mafia (it was a game where you randomly choose two people to be assassins and one to be a detective, and the rest are just normal players – each round the assassins kill a player and the other players have to try to guess who the assassins are – that’s the short short version). It was pretty fun, but I was tired by midnight, so I headed to my room and chilled out and went to bed around 1:30 or 2.

The next morning we had a buffet breakfast at the hotel and then set out for Odawara Castle. The castle was really gorgeous, and the plum trees were blossoming, so I spent a lot of time wandering around and taking photos.

Odawara Castle

Plum Blossoms

From the trees at the base of the castle. They look like little alien plants! :)

After Odawara Castle, we traveled on to the Mt. Daiya-zan Saijo Temple complex, which was also really spectacular.

I have a lot of photos from this place as well, but I’m going to post a link to a video I shot of the priests chanting prayers and playing the taiko drums. You can check out the photos on flickr. Also, the was this guy with two cats on leashes. It was really adorable. I have photos of that as well. I will get video of the cat guy and the rest of the Hakone videos up when I get a chance.

After the temple, we got back on the bus and headed back to Tokyo. It was a fun weekend, but I’m totally exhausted from all the traipsing around. It made my cold reactivate a bit, so I’m trying to take it fairly easy today, although I have a lot to accomplish before Amey gets here on Friday! So excited for her to be here and our trip to Kyoto/Nara/Osaka/Himej!

Anyway, ja mata!

Well, I finally got around to editing my video footage of Toshogu. It’s pretty terrible, but the conditions were hard, as the walking was rocky and there was snow (caused some overexposure and camera shake). So, here it is…

I think my motivation came from the fact that I have a ton of photos and video from Hakone that I need to get onto my computer, so I wanted to free up some space. :) Anyway, whatever the motivations, at least I’m only behind by some days. I might put up some video from the train ride to Nikko as well, since it might be interesting to some to see the Japanese “countryside.”

Well, that’s all for now…. Ja, mata!

So, after much prodding by my friend Olivia, I finally decided to try traditional Japanese bathing. Olivia is very fond of visiting our local sento (bathhouse), but she had not yet convinced me to come with her. This evening, however, she upped the ante by inviting me to the Odaiba Oedo Onsen (an onsen is a hot spring). I finally caved, since I’m doing onsen this weekend in Hakone, and I figured it would probably be a good idea to do a trial run.

I’m just going to do a quick description here, because I should be sleeping, as I have to be up in 5 hours to go to go Hakone. The Oedo onsen is supposedly an actual onsen, but it seems very fabricated, as it is quite a recreational facility. Bathing there was a particularly complex procedure.

When you arrive, you remove your shoes and place them in a locker (one of many). From there, you proceed through the decorated lobby (of which I have a photo and will eventually post) to the check-in area. There, you pay the basic onsen fee (roughly 2000 yen, or $20) and receive a key attached to a cord that goes around your wrist. On the key is a barcode. The key is to a locker in the respective changing area.

Once obtaining a key, you proceed over to the yukata area and select a yukata from the designs available. Then you enter the changing area for your gender, designated by a large cloth hanging over the doorway. In the changing area, you find your locker, stowe your belongings, and change into your yukata. This was a relief, since I had my school bag with me and my computer, and I was worried about what I would do with all this stuff. So, I stowed the first locker key and all my belongings and clothes into the locker and locked it with the second locker key.

From here, you are free to wander a little inside “shopping area,” which has food, snacks, palm readers, and shopping. When you are ready (which was for us, immediately, since we wanted to be out by last train and it was already almost 10 PM), you can enter the bath area and follow the signs for your gender towards the baths.

The nice thing about this onsen is that they provide pretty much everything you need to bathe, including soap, shampoo, moisturizers, hair products, hair dryers and even a brush and toothbrush. So, we went to our THIRD lockers and disrobed from the yukata. We were also given two towels. One was for drying off, and the other was for taking with us into the onsen. Stowing everything in the third locker, except my glasses which I forgot to remove and the small towel, we proceeded to the bathing area.

Traditional Japanese bathing requires that you scrub yourself off in a stall before entering the springs or bath to soak. So, Olivia and I sat down on some stools and scrubbed off. The bathing area itself was nice, with granite or marble, ambient lighting and steaming baths all over. There were probably five or six different baths inside and a few outside as well.

After we had scrubbed off, we proceeded to explore the baths. We pretty much just flitted from one to another, trying not to overheat. The jacuzzi was really relaxing, and the milky mineral bath was also nice. Outside was nice too, although the water was quite hot compared to the air, which made it refreshing but easy to overheat. The steam room was also surprisingly pleasant. It wasn’t too wet, and it wasn’t too dry. I did almost pass out a couple times.

When we decided to head back inside, I was grateful there was a vending machine there, because the world was spinning and things were starting to go black. That’ll teach me not to eat a substantial meal before onsen! Next time, I’ll know. And I’ll bring bottled water with me to the bathing area.

The experience itself was very relaxing. The water just soaks into you and gets to every muscle. I probably could have stayed out there longer if I hadn’t gotten dizzy. The bracelets functioned as an accounting system as well. A barcode reader on the vending machine read the code and dispensed drinks. All of the little shops functioned the same way as well.

After we had some beverages and dried our hair, we redressed in yukata and wandered through the shop area looking for ice cream. We found a group of people from school, got ice cream, and chatted with them for a bit. Before long, however, it was 11:30, and we had to hustle if we wanted to make last train. The others planned on staying there all night, but I didn’t want to be a zombie for hakone tomorrow, so we headed home.

It was a little pricey for the amount of time we spent there, which was only an hour or two max, but, overall, it was well worth it! After we changed back into our clothes, we dropped off our locker keys and the check out personnel charged us for whatever we’d purchased using the wrist bands. Mine was only 620 yen – ice cream, a tea and a sandwich pack for the road.

We hopped the train and headed back across the bay to Shimbashi station and headed home from there. I also highly recommend taking the train across the bay. It’s very cheap, only 370 yen, and it was a gorgeous ride. I tried to snap a couple photos, but I only had my cell phone camera, so they turned out pretty blurry and bad.

There were a lot of services that we didn’t even take advantage of in the onsen, including the foot bath (only co-ed bath), the massage chairs, the foot massage machines, the full-body massages, the lounge, etc. Also, if you decide to stay past 2 AM, they will charge you an extra 1500 yen, but you can stay there all night until 9 AM and sleep in the lounge.

Anyway, that’s all the info I have about the Oedo Onsen Monogatori for the moment. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are in Tokyo and can’t get out of the city to visit a “real” onsen.

Ja mata!

Since visiting, I have subsequently written a couple of articles on Ooedo Onsen Monogatari. Hopefully, they will be of use to those of you interested in visiting!

Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Part 1: Directions and Overview
Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Part 2: Procedure for Entering and Navigating the Baths

This title is a bit of a misnomer, since I made the executive decision not to go on the prison tour. I woke up with a sore, thick-feeling throat this morning. So, I decided to stay in and rest up. Sorry babe for having you bring my pantsuit six thousand miles!! :(

However, the main attraction of this week is that I’m going on a school-sponsored trip to Hakone this weekend, which is the site of a large national park near Mt. Fuji.

Our group leaves early Saturday morning and spends the night at a Japanese hotel, and comes back Sunday evening. I’m pretty stoked to be going. Activities planned include: the Hakone Open-Air Museum – which has a bunch of sculptures and a large Picasso exhibit, Owakudani – great viewing of Mt. Fuji, Odawara Castle, and Mt. Daiyu-zan Temple, not to mention a stay at Hakone Yumoto Hotel, which has an onsen.

So, it should be a fun trip with lots of culture. Maybe I will even try one of the sulfurous eggs available to eat at Owakudani. They are said by some to be touristy, but it still sounds like a potentially interesting experience. :)

As you leave Rinnoji, the path leads you naturally to Togoshu, which was nice. They were situated close, with a beautiful line of trees framing the stone Torii gate. The Toshogu shrine is quite large and extravagant, and it was the highlight of the trip.

Inside the torii and to the left was a five story pagoda, representing the earthly elements and heaven. It was incredibly detailed in its carvings and beautifully colored. Here is a detail of the pagoda.

Omotemon gate and Nioh statues – This was the large gate we entered to get into the main complex. The two demon-looking things are Nioh. And there were some really weird elephant carvings around it as well.

Detail of Nioh’s face

Detail of one of the carved elephants

Past the gate was the three sacred warehouses, one of which had this bizarre elephant carving. Here is a shot of the warehouses.

Here is a detail shot of the elephant carvings… They were horrible as elephants but very beautiful!

One of the most famous things about the Togoshu shrine is the three monkeys adorning the sacred stable. The carving depicts the monkeys with the hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil theme. Here is the stable.

The actual carving is only a small part of the stable. The carvings were very beautiful and detailed though. Here is a shot of the monkeys.

From this area, another torii gate lead to the main shrine area.

Youmeimon Gate to the main shrine – has 500 sculptures on it. One design on one of the columns is even upside down as an intentional perfection not to anger the spirits.

The main shrine (wedding hall I think) let us in, but we couldn’t take pictures inside. After that, we decided to pay the extra 520 yen to get into the Okusha Inner Shrine, where Tokugawa’s remains are kept.

Here is the little sleeping cat that guards the entrance.

After the kitty was a long walk up a mountain to get to Tokugawa’s memorial.

After a small prayer hall and building, you walk around the back to find the container of Ieyasu’s ashes, the Okusha-houtou.

After that, we pretty much headed out of Togoshu Shrine. We tried to visit Futurasan, but it was closed. For more photos of the temples we visited and the closed temple Futarasan, you can visit Flickr.

I do want to end this Nikko blog with a photo of the Shinkyo Sacred Bridge. It was so gorgeous, and I loved it. We weren’t allowed to walk on it. I suspect it was closed because of snow and ice.

Oh, and one more for the road… of the clouds sitting over the mountains behind downtown Nikko.

You kind of have to see that last one big to get the full effect. Either way, sorry for the photo spam. I’m done for now. This weekend, I will be in Hakone. I will post something later about the sights I’ll be visiting while I’m there. Hopefully, I’ll return with more photos and descriptions.

Oh, and getting home was almost as scary as getting there. We took an earlier train back than anticipated, because they were worried that we wouldn’t make it if we took a later one. And it ended up being local for half the way back. Luckily, we only had to transfer once, and we made it back okay! Overall, it was really an adventure.

I plan to go back to Nikko some time in April or May, when the botanical garden is open, because it has 3,000 varieties of plants and flowers supposedly.

Anyway… Ja, mata!

Well, after arriving at Nikko and having some tasty, hot ramen, we decided to set out for the temples and shrines. Our pass gave us admission to Rinnoji Temple, Togoshu Shring, and the Futarasan Shrine.

We only made it through the first two sites before 3:30, when the temples close in the winter. Both Rinnoji and Toshogu were incredibly impressive visually. The are both done in a stunning Chinese-style with intricate carvings and elaborate colors. The weather on Sunday was not ideal for photography, because it was overcast, and much of the area had a light cover of snow, which caused there to be some exposure issues.

I took some video of the areas, which I will edit and post. In the meantime, here are some of the better photos from the ones I was able to get.

Rinnoji Temple

Sanbutsudoh Hall (Three Buddha Hall, roughly): A caretaker scurries around the side of the main shrine, which housed three large buddha statues. We were not allowed to photograph the inside. The temple was also under renovation, so the three statues presented an intimidating, but beautiful, sight.

Gohoh-tendoh prayer hall: A hall located behind the Sanbutsudoh hall, and is for the private benefit of prayer. It had a lot of chairs inside where people could sit and ruminate. It was very peaceful.

Sorintou Tower: The Sohrintoh Tower was located in Oku-in (Inner House) of Toshogu Shrine originally, but was relocated to another place near Futarasan Shrine in 1650. After that, the tower was moved to today’s place in 1875. The last relocation was caused by the law that Meiji government announced to separate Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple.

Well, as most people might know, I didn’t end up getting to go snowboarding on Sunday. Instead, I decided to travel to Nikko with a couple of friends. Nikko is considered a World Heritage Site because of some of the temples and shrines there, so some of the train lines offer special passes for foreigners to go visit. The pass pays for a trip there and back, transit on one of the buses, and admission to three of the major sites.

When I got up on Sunday, I checked the weather, and it was terrible. It was gusting wind, and Nikko was supposed to be in the low 20s. The icon also showed snow. I was a little dubious, but we’d agreed to meet at the station at 7:40 AM, so I basically just sucked it up and got on the train. One of the ladies I was traveling with, Erin, got onto my train, so we ended up riding there most of the way together, and we met Becky shortly after as we were exiting the station.

I told them what the weather was looking like, and we were all a little nervous. We almost scrapped it, but then decided to go on ahead with our plans. We managed to get spots on the 8:15 train with some cocoa (or coffee) in our hands and some sandwiches from a local coffee shop. The train was pretty slow and rickety, but it seemed fine. As we wound our way north, the ground began to have little patches of snow on it, and the wind gusted now and again, blowing around snow and blowing through the trees. At one point, the train came to stop, and it just kind of sat there for a while. We started to get nervous, because we couldn’t understand what the conductor was saying, and he was talking a lot. Finally, Becky leaned over and asked the lady next to us what they were saying. I could see that she had been translating for her boyfriend, who was a foreigner.

She explained that the wind had knocked another train that was before us off the track, and that it was delaying our train. We were all pretty freaked out to hear that and again doubted the intelligence of heading out to Nikko on this particular day. Eventually, another train pulled up next to ours, and they transferred us to that train, and we continued on, reaching Nikko with little other issues. In Nikko, it was bitterly cold and windy, so we decided to pop in for some ramen before getting on the bus to the temple sites.

I will pick up the story again later, with some photos and possibly some video at that time…

In the meantime, here’s an article about the terrible winds we were dealing with: Japan Times.

We weren’t on a bullet train, but we were on a train in Tochigi Prefecture: “All bullet trains on the line were suspended at around 7:55 a.m. when winds of more than 108 kph were recorded between Utsunomiya Station in Tochigi Prefecture and Shinshirakawa Station in Fukushima Prefecture, East Japan Railway Co. said. Services were resumed around noon.”

Anyway, I will post the rest later… ja, mata!

So, last week was a great week. David came to visit me in Tokyo, and we had a lot of fun. I had missed him a lot over the last month, and I miss him again because he has gone back to Orlando. So, this entry will probably be pretty long, because I want to post some notes and photos about what we did during the week.

Needless to say, we didn’t do anywhere near all the things I would have liked to have done, but we did accomplish some goals for the trip. :)

Goal 1: Okonomiyaki

So, the first goal was to try some okonomiyaki, which is a Japanese food that is basically a cabbage pancake with meat in it. Sounds weird, but it’s pretty tasty. Our experience was on the experimental side, because none of us had actually made okonomiyaki before. We had some trouble locating the place in Shinjuku that we ended up at, called Monja. It seemed to have either switched floors or moved, or whatnot, but we eventually found it. I went with David and my friends Justin and Becky. Through Becky’s querying of the locals, we finally made it there and got seated. Then there was a mix up with the service. It was fairly tense for a bit there, but we managed to get through it and all get some okinomiyaki. I really liked it, but I ended up seasoning mine liberally with sauce, salt and pepper. I think next time I go, I will have a much better understanding of how the process works. :)

Sadly, I have no photos of okonomiyaki…

Goal 2: Ghibli Museum

So, one of our goals for the trip was to visit Ghibli Museum (Wikipedia site). If you are ever interested in doing this while you are in Tokyo, it’s a quick train ride to Mitaka, and the museum and surrounding area are very pretty. Here is a site that gives you information on obtaining a ticket: Getting tickets! Apparently, they can also be obtained at Lawson’s, which I didn’t know, but it was fine that we got them in the U.S. (except for the crazy shipping fee).

The museum, apart from having exhibits of various kinds (including a really cool stroboscope) and a mock up of Miyazaki’s studio with storyboards, etc., also allows you to view one of a number of films only shown at the museum. The one we saw was called The Whale Hunt, and it was very cute. :) They rotate the films every month.

Anyway, here are a couple photos from the museum. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside the museum, but I have more of the grounds up on Flickr.

David and I in front of the mock ticket booth. Totoro was there to welcome us! There were Totoro characters all over the place, but that one was my favorite, except for the immense stuffed catbus, which we weren’t allowed to photograph.

This shot is from the roof or cafe… can’t remember which. You can see a bit of snow still on the ground. It had snowed on Saturday, and it was still all over the ground on Monday. Really, though, it was still on the ground in parts of Tokyo as late as the following Saturday, because we saw some at the Meiji Jingu shrine as well.

The side of the museum, and some kids playing in the snow. :)

The robot from Laputa:Castle in the Sky on the roof of the museum.

So, those are a few of the photos from the museum.

Goal 3: Imperial Palace

This was kind of a failure… we were supposed to take a tour of the imperial palace, but I managed not to know exactly where to meet the tour, and we ended up there early, and it was very cold and blustery out, so we just wandered around the east garden for a bit, which is the grounds of the original Edo Imperial Palace.

Here are some photos…

This was a guardhouse

A shot of the foundation walls, which were currently being restored. You can see the modern buildings in the background.

This was my favorite structure on the grounds. It was a music hall dedicated to one of the Empresses. It was really ornate and the mosaics were really gorgeous. David though it looked like some kitschy 60’s building. I liked it though. :P

David on the top of the highest platform of the foundation. The sky and trees were really gorgeous that day. Too bad it was super cold!

Valentine’s Day

So, we didn’t really have any plans for Valentine’s Day. David doesn’t observe it… sniff sniff Although, I did present him with a bag of goodies Japanese-style. I even tried to bake him cookies, but that failed miserably… My grandmother would never be able to survive here. My apartment doesn’t even have a proper oven! So, given that we didn’t have any particular plans, I thought I’d look around for somewhere nice to eat.

Using Gourmet Navigator, I looked for a shabu shabu place, because I thought that shabu shabu would be an interesting kind of Japanese dish for David to try. It’s not really something that’s readily available in the U.S. Through the site, I lucked onto the restaurant used in the movie Lost in Translation. The restaurant is called ShabuZen, and it is located in Shibuya. It was fairly painless to find, since David and I decided to take a cab from the Shibuya station. ShabuZen is located in the Creston Hotel, which is a really small hotel near the NHK building. The menu contained many price ranges for beef shabu shabu. The cheapest started at 3500 yen per person and went up to something like 15,000 yen per person… Needless to say, we opted for the inexpensive imported Australian beef. It tasted just fine. Also, you have the option of getting all-you-can-eat shabu shabu at ShabuZen, but we decided against it, as neither of us needed that much food. The people sitting next to us must have gone through five plates of beef in the time it took us to eat one. It was pretty impressive. The other option was to have a kaiseki meal (or course meal) along with the shabu shabu. Since I thought it might be fun to try kaiseki, and it was something I was thinking of us doing at a ryokan anyway, we decided to go for it.

Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of what shabu shabu is for those interested. It ALSO has an explanation of kaiseki. Wikipedia is my hero! It means I never have to go into the detail needed to explain all this stuff to everyone. :) Also, here is a link to the restaurant, if anyone is interested in going there.

So, the shabu shabu kaiseki ended up costing about 5,000 yen per person, which wasn’t too bad, given that we got a bunch of courses. Of course, the waiter accidentally bought us out the wrong appetizers from a more expensive meal, so we got some free, weird fish. I took photos of each of the courses, because they were really beautifully presented and the food was definitely weird. So, here’s my photos of food from ShabuZen… (also, these photos were taken with my casio exilim cell phone camera, so I apologize for their quality… I didn’t think to bring a real camera for some reason).

1st Course – fish jello

Some kind of fish skin suspended in meat-flavored gelatin, served cold, with scallions on top. It actually wasn’t too bad, but I could only get through one of the two little bricks they served. You’ll notice the beautiful plates. Everything served to us came out in gorgeous plates.

2nd Course – raw fish mistake!

This appetizer was actually served to us by mistake. It consisted of two tiny, raw squid, two clumps of fish eggs wrapped around something that tasted like ham, and some pickled veggies. The fish eggs and squid were actually pretty good. David was okay with the squid, but I think the fish eggs creeped him out. :)

3rd Course – Soup

I found this course to be one of the more aesthetically pleasing ones. It was a mild soup with pink noodles in it that had a flowery taste. Under the large veggie flower was a bread soaked in the soup that had what tasted like octopus meat in it. It was pretty good as well! And very lovely!

4th Course – Sashimi

The next course was a sashimi course, with some tuna and an unidentified white fish. The tuna was excellent. It just melted in your mouth, the way good tuna steak does. Mmmm. The white fish was okay too.

5th Course – Cooked fish and goo

This was the final course before the shabu shabu. It was a firm white fish, cooked, with a gelatinous goo and some wasabi on top. The fish was pretty tasty, although the good was a little odd for my taste.

6th Course -Shabu Shabu

Finally it was time for the shabu shabu course… even the bowl was extremely elaborate.

Meat and veggies boiling away. David and I ate pretty slowly, just adding a couple slices of beef a time. You can see the raw meat in the back of the shot. It was a very pleasant meal. You basically just cook the beef and veggies in the pot and pull them out when they are done, dip them into a bowl of sauce, and eat them with your chopsticks.

7th Course – Noodle Course

We were stuffed at this point, but we still had more to go… after the shabu shabu, the servers will take the “broth” that you’ve basically been simmering and make a cup of japanese noodles for you out of it. I didn’t think to photograph it until it was almost gone, but it was noodles that were wide and flat with some kind of thing that looked like a lump of mochi in it. The broth was quite tasty!

8th Course – Desert

This was our course desert (we ended up with yuzu sherbert and caramel ice cream also, because we’re insane), which was a stack of candied apricot jellies. I had had my fill of gelatinous things by that point in the evening, so I didn’t eat much of mine.

Us

And one of us – it’s on the blurry side, but you can kind of see the restaurant’s decor. You’ll probably recognize it if you’ve seen Lost in Translation.

Miscellany…

So, other stuff we did included visiting the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, shopping around for a coat for David, visiting the Meiji Jingu shrine, visiting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, karaoke with friends on Friday, and taking the most ridiculous photobooth photos ever!

I have photos of most of these things up on flickr, although you can only see the photobooth photos if you are listed as a friend or family member. They are too goofy to be released for public consumption.

Some samurai armor from the Tokyo National Museum.

A noh mask from the Tokyo National Museum.

A cute, but blurry photo of us from karaoke.

Entrance gate to the Meiji-jingu shrine.

Meiji-jingu main shrine.

Anyway… that is about all I can think of for last week. It flew by, and it feels like it didn’t last nearly long enough, but I guess we did a lot more than I thought we did. :) Anyway, hopefully, this weekend, I will get to try snowboarding for the very first time. If so, I will have some photos of Nagano to show everyone. If not, there is always the Hakone trip next weekend (which is sponsored by the school).

Well, I miss everyone at home, but I am making the best of my time here. So, for now… ja mata!

I’m still a terrible singer, but I finally experienced Japanese karaoke last night. It was actually a lot of fun. Unlike in my karaoke experiences in the U.S., where you are in a large bar filled with strangers and you have to get up in front of them, face them, and sing (a la performance-style), Japanese karaoke is where you rent out a small room for a few hours. The room has chairs, a big TV, weird lighting if you want (which we didn’t use), and a phone where you can call to order snacks and beverages. Everyone stands around facing the TV, and you hands off the two microphones to each other to sing various songs.

It was my friend Becca’s birthday, so we decided to combine her birthday karaoke with the evening that my friend Carrie had planned in Gotanda. It worked out well for those of us who lived nearby (such as me, Olivia, Carrie, and Matt), because we could all walk home. We didn’t get out there until almost 11 though, because some of us went home to drop off bags, etc.

Some other observations about karaoke. The songs available were extensive (even the English selection). I was really surprised. I wasn’t able to find any Shins, which made me sad, and they didn’t have all of Lily Allen’s album, but they did have LDN, which is the song I chose to sing. I would have actually sung more, but I wasn’t fast enough entering stuff into the queue I guess. Some of my friends are really great singers. I won’t name names.

The karaoke remote panel is really cool. If it works properly, it lets you search by song, by artist, or enter in a key code for the specific song you want. You can also skip songs, and do a bunch of other functions that would probably be cool if we could read kanji better.

We ended up with a random Japanese salary man in our room, named Hide (Hee – Deh is how you pronounce it). He was trying to practice his English, but by the end of the few hours, he was pretty drunk. He was funny though, and he sang a Japanese rap song, which was pretty impressive actually. He must have known it by heart, because he barely looked at the screen. I think he went out to a bar with the others after we left karaoke, but Olivia and I went home at that point. My wallet and my kidney were both hating me. :) I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hide again, since he got both Nathan’s and Rebecca’s phone numbers or vice versa.

That’s the other observation of Japanese karaoke – it’s not something I could afford to do every weekend (or every night – I think salary men in Japan do it QUITE frequently). That said, at least they try to give you some value for your money. The place we were at was called Karaoke Kon, and it was 3000 yen for nomihodai (all you can drink). We were there an hour with no nomihodai, so it ended up being more than 3000 yen each, but it was a lot of fun, and it was something new to try. We were originally going to go to Big Echo right nearby, but it was at least 1000 yen more. Yikes!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to taking my visitors out karaoking with my friends, because I think they’d really enjoy it. Maybe we’ll do it for my birthday when Lynette is here. I think she’d get a kick out of it. I’m supposed to be out karaoking again RIGHT NOW, but I couldn’t get up this morning, so Carrie is off without me. I decided it was more important to try to feel better for the Sestubun festivals tomorrow.

So, I will probably take it easy today. I don’t even know if I will go to Shinjuku to talk to the travel agent or to Ginza to visit the Apple store. I probably need to get some food at some point though.

Anyway, that all for my ramblings about karaoke!

Ja, mata!