We’ve had a busy last 4 days in Kyoto. I’m writing this on the train to Osaka; trains seem to be the best place to write these posts :) I promise to write more frequently now that we’re staying at the same hotel for the next 5 days.
Our last days in Tokyo consisted of our big Sushi dinner, which I detailed last post, and then some more sight seeing. Here’s what we did.
We visited our first temple in Asakusa on our second-to-last day. We would visit a lot more temples once we got to Kyoto, but this one in Asakusa was a nice beginning to what would be day after day of temple visits in Kyoto. We debated taking a water taxi down the river, but instead opted to walk to the Tokyo Skytree which was about 15 minutes away.
Tokyo Skytree is a 350 meter tall tower with a 360 degree observation deck. It was worth it to go once and we got some good pictures but not worth a revisit.
Afterwards we hopped on the subway to Tsukiji fish market, which is the famous fish market in Tokyo where they have tuna auctions every morning at 5am. We were not willing to sacrifice sleep to visit them as we heard you have to arrive at 3am to even get in. Gross.
We made it to the fish market around 2pm and had time to walk around and sit down for a quick bite at a conveyor belt sushi spot. Everyone sits in a circle around the sushi bar and a little conveyor belt winds around with plates of sushi on it. If you see something that looks good you can take it off and they charge you by the plate, but you can also order sushi directly from the chefs as well. We wanted to establish a baseline sushi experience to compare our dinner that night to and this spot fit the bill perfectly. We tried some tuna, squid, and a few other plates and had just enough food to hold us over until dinner in a few hours.
The next morning we headed to Odaiba, which is a shopping district that was built across several man made islands. The Japanese do not mess around when it comes to shopping, there are two multi-level shopping malls within walking distance of each other in Odaiba.
We had a surprisingly delicious lunch here which was way better than anything we’ve had at a mall back home. I had a dish called Negi Yaki Soba, which is basically noodles sandwiched between fried egg on the bottom and a pancake on top, and Cody had a tempura dish over rice.
We mainly came here to see the giant Gundam. It is a life sized replica of an actual Gundam from the anime show which Cody is a huge fan of. After taking a copious amount of pictures with the Gundam, we walked over to the other multi-level mall in this area and played some video games at the arcade before heading home.
Next up, temple overload in Kyoto.