Sleeping In
We planned on getting up super early this morning (Mary and Steve wanted to get super super fresh sushi at the market), but decided to sleep off the jetlag until about 8AM. My body is confused, not just about the jetlag, but about why it's awake and moving in the early morning. Very disorienting! We went downstairs and grabbed a free breakfast in the hotel lobby - rice, miso soup, yogurt with mystery fruit, a marinated salad of mystery root, hard boiled egg, rolls and scalding coffee (ouch!). It was really tasty for a free breakfast and mystery food is exciting! Also, the lobby is really neat looking. I can't help but think about how expensive it is as a space every time I pass through, and while I eat breakfast I stare through it to watch the morning commuters heading to Shiodome Station. It's an enormous empty space which is crazy, considering the size of hotel rooms and apartments and shops in Tokyo. Our room looks out into it, so I'm glad the lobby gets a lot of light.
Tsukiji in the Morning
From there, we wandered the streets of Shiodome for a bit in an attempt to find the entrance to Tsukiji Market. Eventually we found it, after asking for some directions in a cafe. Along the way I spotted a bicycle with a toddler seat on the front end (doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me to mount a kid on your handlebars, but hey). When we arrived, we began by winding our way through a crowded row of small shops selling all sorts of things - t-shirts, kitchen implements, sandals, fans, mushrooms and dried fish, vegetables, and small restaurants with long lines at their windows. We accidentally found our way into the industrial seafood part of the market before we righted ourselves, and wandered deeper into the marketplace. It was interesting to watch the men work transporting the goods (mostly fish) around on little trolleys and motorbikes as we crossed through the industrial section on the way to the commercial center. Mary and Steve scoped out the sushi stands to decide where they wanted to return for breakfast, and I tried to to identify as many plants and animals as I could. We found booths of smoked and dried fish (stinky), live eels, ENORMOUS edamame, and all sorts of interesting food products. It was exactly as Steve explained it to me - Pike Place Market on crack. It was much larger and more diverse in products, and instead of having several levels it just sprawls out in an endless web of chaos. Some of the restaurants were really just stalls, and others were conveyor belt style, behind glass doors with proper seating. There are more pics in the flickr pool.
Ginza
From there, we headed to Ginza, a popular upscale shopping district. We made our way to the Sony store, but arrived shortly before opening. We went across the street and grabbed drinks at a cafe in the mall across the street, and sat for a few minutes to rest our feet. After we finished our juice and coffee, we headed back down to the Sony store, which was an endless spiral of shiny electronic toys. Headphones, digital and video cameras, mp3 players, home stereos and laptops. It was fun to try out all the merchandise! I found some super (expensive) noise canceling headphones, and we enjoyed watching Rolly do its thing. It was adorable, dancing around to cheerful dance music, but I was left wondering what it would do for something like Nine Inch Nails. I enjoyed walking around this district - it reminded me of an exploded 5th Avenue - there were luxury shops everywhere. All the familiar posh stores were present, and some stores were bigger and more ostentatious than their New York versions. Tokyo is certainly a shopping mecca, and beyond that the architecture here is really something else.
The juxtaposition of traditional and high tech is stunning and disorienting, and I absolutely adore it. I also love the way everything grows upward - the malls and shops are all vertical, and there are signs going all the way to the top! The European/Urban American model of retail shops below office space or residential space certainly doesn't hold here. We wandered around for a bit, trying to find some stores with a map, but the lack of proper street addresses made it slow going. We thought we found a store that might sell textiles and such, but it wound up being a bit like a Japanese mini-Ikea. We ate at the little cafeteria for lunch, along with a lot of business women, nurses, and some families. Steve and Mary shared a hot/cold deli plate and I ate some mystery bread that turned out to be curry bread (YUM), a desert pastry filled with mystery fruit, and had some milk with strawberry vinegar (adventure number 1 for the day! It was actually pretty good and tasted a lot like yogurt).
From there, we wandered through a paper store where I bought some Japanese pens (I might have to buy more, I absolutely love them) and a little scratch pad to carry in my purse. One of the added bonuses to being left handed is that a lot of Japanese stationary accommodates well! Mary bought a box packaged inside a box that was then wrapped in paper and placed in a shop bag. I like shopping here just because the store clerks are so polite and the service is so great. In a lot of larger stores, there is a person who waits to greet you at the front of the line, takes your merchandise when it's your turn at the register, and bows to the clerk who rings you up. You place your money in the dish and it's then taken to the actual cashier who makes the change, and your clerk returns it to you. Everything is wrapped and placed in bags. I am morbidly curious what happens if you say something is a gift. The clerks also tend to dress in uniform, and I have to admit it's really nice. I knew that it was the practice to dress quite nice in Japan, but even a lot of the men driving delivery trucks are in suits, not to mention the cabbies (and the cabs are really nice too, I remember reading about them a few months ago - a lot of them are Rolls Royces).
The streets were blocked off from traffic in the afternoon, and chairs and umbrellas were placed in the middle of the streets - apparently this is a normal practice. People milled around and rested - it was sunny and warm, a really nice day. We took a load off for a while. I bought some curry bread for emergency vegetarian rations, and Mary got some nice chocolates. We sat in the middle of the road and did some people watching. There were lots of fancy Japanese ladies pushing strollers and toting shopping bags, and a lot of businessmen in their suits and ties. Lots of older people as well.
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