Since the trains don’t start running until after 5am, I opted not to spend the previous night outside the fish market waiting for it to open :P I headed out at the more reasonable time of 9am and wandered until I found the market. It took me a few minutes of walking around in circles through the tiny streets and alleys that surround the HUGE market to actually figure out how to enter the warehouse like expanse of the wholesale area. My search was complicated by the fact that thousands of Japanese men were frantically hurrying around everywhere in trucks, carts, scooters and bikes, which made every street crossing relatively frightening!
I conquered a few crosswalks, narrowly avoided certain fishy-transport doom, and found my way into the dark, cool maze of the fish market. As far as you can see there are tight rows of stalls filled with wall to wall fish: eels, crabs, tiny fish, giant fish, octopus, huge abalone with shells as big as a football, dried fish, salted fish, cold cases full of smoking dry ice and enormous slabs of deep red tuna, squid, aquariums of live fish, urchins, clams, mussels, and shrimp. If it lives underwater, you can find it there!
I aimlessly strolled and weaved through the endless alleys of fish. I saw fats rats scurrying under the tables, and was constantly stepping over puddles of melting ice mixed with fish blood and parts….but mostly I just enjoyed the view! There was just so much delicious looking seafood that the icky parts of the experience were easy to ignore, and after about 40 minutes of meandering through the goods I decided to find a restaurant and find some breakfast sushi!
Weird as it may sound, I found a place that looked relatively reputable, was full of what I can only imagine was Japanese tourists, and was reasonable priced. I grabbed the picture menu (lifesaver!) and pointed at the pieces I wanted to try. I got two big pieces of familiar tuna and salmon, but also tried some abalone and eel nigiri that looked exotic and yummy.
Almost everything was delicious! But one slab, the abalone, was just weird…I popped the whole nigiri it into my mouth (apparently it’s rude to do otherwise) and chomped down but found that it had the consistency of a rubber eraser. I just couldn’t chew it no matter how hard I tried! I quickly gave up and had to resort to spitting it out in the damp hand towel they gave me to wash my hands when I walked in.
Overall, it was a small but tasty breakfast, and I left the Tsujiki area to go see some more sights. I rode the train to another neighborhood, called Shibuya, which is a posh, young area known for its shopping and “hip” vibe. Shibuya is also famous for having the most trafficked pedestrian intersection in the world: when all the traffic lights of the six way intersection simultaneously turn red, the circular crosswalk is flooded from all sides with tens of thousands of people rushing through every hour, all hours of the day. I crossed though the famous crossing and headed to the Starbucks (also famous for being the world’s top grossing S-bucks) since it had a second floor view of the masses.
I watched the river of humanity ebb and flow and sipped a coffee while waiting for a passing rain cloud to blow over. When the drizzle stopped, I walked to the neighborhood called Harajuku, which is best known as a vibrant, high-end shopping area. Guidebooks refer to it as the “Champs-Elysess” of Tokyo, and it’s a bustling road lined with huge leafy green trees and stores like Gucci, Dior, etc. I did about 10 minutes of window-shopping, but since I couldn’t afford anything even not considering the poor exchange rate, I eventually headed back to the ryokan to grab my bags and start the journey to Yokohama to check into my hotel-home for the next week!
The train journey took about 45 minutes, and was relatively painless. I did accidentally get onto an express train, so I did have to hop off and switch to a local in the middle of the trip, but all in all it was easy! My hotel was just a 3 minute walk straight out of the train station, and I checked in with no issues.
When I walked into the room I was a bit surprised – I can only describe it as a queen bed sized room jammed with a double bed and not much else. There is no closet, and the bathroom is so snug that I can spread my arms and touch both walls….but it’s functional and has everything I need, and it feels almost cozy for just one person :)
grabbed a shower and walked out to find dinner and happened upon 3 other students at the conference (a French woman named Margot, a Chinese guy named Charlie, and a Chilean guy named Francisco) so I invited them to go grab some food. Since none of us had found a map of Yokohama (in English....or French or Spanish or Chinese), we just headed back towards the train station which seemed to have a lot of restaurants around it.
We settled on a place jammed with local men eating what appeared to be grilled skewers of meat. There was no English on the menu, but Charlie claimed that he could read many of the Japanese characters, so we trusted him and sat down. We pantomimed (none of the staff spoke ANY English) that we wanted some beers and then turned to Charlie to guide us through the menu full of indecipherable squiggles….but it turned out that he know about 10% of what everything said, so we basically chose 20 skewers at random and hoped for the best.
I have to say, I got a bit nervous as I saw the plates delivered to neighboring tables: I could clearly identify what seemed to be intestine, tendon, tongue, ears, cartilage, gizzards, and other “parts” on sticks steaming on the tiny plates. As our food began to arrive, I tried my best NOT to guess what was on each plate before trying it. None of us could be 100% sure, but we suppose we ended up eating intestine, liver, stomach, chicken skin, chicken breast, and a few veggies. Intestine ended up being my favorite of the unidentifiable skewers, but I can’t say I will be revisiting that restaurant! Without a Japanese guide or some pictures, its hard to make a meal work….but I felt accomplished for trying, and had fun chatting with the other students.
They had all arrived a few hours ago, so they were wiped out and they headed back to the hotel to rest up for the first day of the program. But I wasn’t ready for bed yet, so I headed into the center of Yokohama to explore. I hopped on the train and rode the three stops to the main station….which is big. I literally got lost for 15 minutes INSIDE the station! A lot of them have labyrinthine networks of underground malls shooting out from every angle, and I kept walking down every wrong way before heading back to the middle and finding a stairwell that went straight up and out of the shopping mecca.
I walked in the direction I thought was towards the waterfront, which was supposed to have cool shops and restaurants, but I couldn’t find the area I was looking for, and I gave up when I found a huge grocery store. I always LOVE ambling through foreign grocery stores, so I was psyched to find one :)
I spent a while going down every aisle and wondering what all the completely unfamiliar products were, bought a few packages of fun looking cookies and candies, then headed back out to the streets. I walked for a while and enjoyed seeing all the Japanese young people going in and out of the bars and arcades for a bit before heading back to the hotel to unpack and get ready for my first day of “summer school!”
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