I'm back in Tokyo! I had a lovely Christmas back home and it was difficult to leave, both emotionally and physically - traffic at a standstill on the M25 for over an hour meant I made check in with only 10 minutes to spare. Then the flight was cramped with even my little legs touching the seat in front, and full of crying babies, rubbish food and no USB ports (my outward bound flight had massive seat back tellys, USB ports and power points and really good food) so it wasn't very enjoyable. Then on the train from the airport to Tokyo two guys with the worst BO polluted the carriage. Eugh.
Enough ranting about the journey. Oh, except that for some reason I've got horrendous jet lag. I seemed to recover very easily in September, whereas now for the past two nights I've not been able to sleep before 5am. No fun at all. Today I got up at 9 and spend a busy, active day so I hope I can sleep tonight at a more reasonable time.
For Christmas I received an iPod touch from Mam and Da (my first apple product, welcome to the dark side etc. and it's also why I was annoyed at there not being USB ports on the plane) and so I've been using it to take photos of everything including Nicole and mines' day trip today.
We went to Ikebukuro, a place two stops north of us which is my favourite place to go shopping. There's a massive shopping centre called Sunshine City with loads of clothes shops, restaurants, a planetarium, an aquarium, a viewing deck and, our destination today; Namco Namjatown.
Namjatown is is a bit like a theme park but more focused on the themes than on rides. It has different areas, there's a scary bit where you hunt for ghosts, a bit with loads of fortune telling machines that I mistook for purikura booths. But what drew us to Namjatown were the gyoza and ice cream areas.
First we went to the gyoza area. If you don't already know, gyoza are dumplings and really really tasty. In the gyoza area it was made to look like a market with stalls selling different types of gyoza. Each with huge queues and baffling menus. I ended up with some pretty standard but very tasty gyoza.
Then we moved from gyoza to ice cream. The ice cream area also had lots of stalls but in the centre of it was an ice cream shop which was fascinating. I'd never seen (or heard) of such bizarre flavours. I wanted to try them all but I didn't want a whole tub so I didn't get to taste any really weird ones. Here's some of the weirdest:
- Potato
- Cream cheese
- Squid ink
- Seaweed
- Shark's fin
- Shark's fin and noodle
- Garlic - 'Dracula'
- Garlic and mint - 'Cool Dracula'
- Fried noodle
- Caviare
- Silk
- Viper
- Charcoal
- Chicken
- Miso
- Wasabi
- Chips
- Tomato
- Sweet potato
- Egg
- Whisky
- Brandy
- Sake
- Beer
- Hot Spring (???)
Seriously baffling flavours. We didn't buy any of the weird ones because you had to buy a whole (but small) tub of it when all we wanted was a little taste and we had no way to get them home without them melting. Most of them were 350-450yen (£2.70-3.40) but some like the caviare and the viper were 1050yen (£8)! Instead we bought a tub each to eat at the time - I chose matcha and tiramasu flavours (they love tiramasu here) and Nicole bought black sesame and yuzu (according to wikipedia it's some sort of Asian citrus fruit). Yum yum yum.
While we were in Namjatown we also visited the scary part to go on a ride. We queued about 20 mins for what we thought was a haunted house ride. We got to the front of the queue we were handed a bizarre red head with a white face and weird little crab legs coming out the bottom. It's difficult to describe but it was a bizarre little thing. It was on a strap we had to put around our neck. The woman tried to explain in a little English what we were meant to do (which was kind of her) although our explanation was considerably shorter than the one she gave everyone else in Japanese. Basically there were a series of photo booths where we had out photo taken (the crab head thing activated the booth) and then we had things jump out at us, like a normal haunted house. Then we would be shown the (unflattering) photo and we'd have another photo taken and then move on. We thought we'd got the hang of it until the last booth, we sat down and when it look our photo the seat jolted down and lights flashed and there was a scary noise. Trust me, it was scary. That was then end of the experience and we were handed a copy of the last photo:
What a great photo!
So after that we tried to leave Namjatown but got horrendously lost. Here's some pretty photos I took on the way out:
Chocolate sushi
Chocolate egg.
Chocolate, white chocolate, strawberry and matcha fountains.
And that was that.
Oh, and in other news - I've discovered why the buildings around here play a noise at 4.30pm (and in summer 6.00pm) - it's to tell children it's going to get dark soon and to head home. Cute.
