Location: Lawson’s outside Shinjuku Subway
Food:
1. Dee – Onigiri with ?filling (only labelled with jap!). I picked the yellow one. It turned out to be tamago (egg) and seasoned soya sauce rice. Should’ve guessed. Anyway, it was interesting. Like eating half boiled egg on rice, only in a triangle shape. Not my fav. Possibly also Egg number 5 in light of Katsudon, onsen egg and hardboiled egg in last 48 hours. Hypercholesterolemia here I come!
2. Rah- Tuna mayo pan = Yum. Very nostalgic for honkie flavours.
Drinks: Kirin Lemon Tea is very asian – almost non-sweet and very thirst quenching. Clara’s coffee-tea mixture in a can – she said it was nice but she is not to have it again as it gave her palpitations.
ShinYokohama Raumen Museum
It is apparently “the first food theme park in Japan”. By food theme park they mean an interesting accumulation of about 15-20 food stalls which mostly sell ramen. It’s divided into two theme areas (1) Ramen restaurant mall and (2) “a 1:1 replica of a section of Tokyo in the year Showa33 (1958)”. By which they mean that they decorated the 15-20 food stalls in a retro theme. Its quite amazing the amount of effort they put in (CF photos – which, unfortunately are still not uploading). There’s even vintage lolly stores and a little amusement area with shoot the can much like the Royal Easter Show. Oh, and did I mention the 5 minutely air-raid sirens going off overhead?
We chose a tonkotsu ramen specialty store to eat at.
Food:
1. Special Tonkotsu ramen
2. Miso Tonkotsu ramen – Very interesting. The lip-smaking-collagen-ness of a tonkotsu base, but it has the OOMPH which I find is often missing, the underlying flavour is stronger and not just “fatty”. The corn was a nice touch and also made the soup base sweet. Its hard to describe, the balance, but I loved it.
Shibuya
We needed to go somewhere to kill time before our next activity… so we went to Shibuya, mainly known as a ginormous shopping district. We visited a CD shop and got a few each, Clara her Japanese ones, Dee just some English CD’s I’d been meaning to get all year. I did get a Japanese Edition of Jamiroquai’s Rock Dust Light Star – with a bonus 6 tracks (2 new singles, 4 remixes/live versions)… guess who it’s for David Chan?? :)
Bunraku – Traditional Japanese Puppet Theatre
Besides the 3-5 meals we have daily, there is time between meals which Clara and I need to kill. I decided about a month ago it would be nice to see some traditional Japenese puppetry (centuries old) which I’d learnt about during my puppeteering days. Each main puppet takes 3 operators to operate, they stay on stage dressed entirely in black, and everyone except the head puppeteer of each character must also cover their head with a black hood. They have completely blank looks and train since they are as young as 14 to be part of the national academy.
As they were ancient Japanese literature, thank God we had English in-ear commentary to help us understand what’s going on.
Unfortunately it went for a whole 4 hours with 2 intermissions. The pace was a little slow at points. Our favourite was the scenes where the puppets where comically fighting and hitting each other on the head with sticks, but mostly its boring monologue.
Dinner at 9:30pm
We were so tired and hungry we went to the nearest open restaurant and stuffed our faces with an assortment of dishes. I can’t say we tasted any of what we ate. I am struggling to remember (just kidding!) but we didn’t take pictures. Not particularly memorable anyway. =(
No comments:
Post a Comment