Grand Adventure 2017 Day 4: Hopeless 'Ramen'-tics
In full transparency waking up for me this morning wasn't easy and it had nothing to do with jet lag. After sake, beer, and a Manhattan last night I was a little toasty. Luckily our first of only two stops on the itinerary for the day wasn't until 10:30 AM. After falling asleep (or passing out) right when we got back to the hotel last night we both woke up a little after 5 AM groggy and not as ready for the day as we would have liked. I finally was able to force myself to go to the gym at 7 AM and even that wasn't my most successful effort.
Luckily by 9 AM, we were out of the hotel and at Starbucks starting to feel like we had a little bit more life in us. I had a grande coffee and Jenn went with a hot chocolate which came back as some sort of Pumpkin drink, I want to say it was a PSL but Jenn didn't think so. From there we hopped back on the subway and went for about twenty minutes until we reached Nippori station.
This morning was our first food tour of the trip. We went with the #1 rated food tour on TripAdvisor from Oishii Tokyo Food Tours. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which of their five offerings to go with and decided to go with the Yanaka food tour which was a four-hour tour through one of the oldest standing neighborhoods in Tokyo. We met up with our guide Meg a little before 10:30 and found out we were the only ones on the tour for the day, so it became a private tour. We walked from the station to the town of Yanaka where we made at least seven or eight stops to try different items. We started out with a divine pancake with a red bean mixture inside (to die for), we had some popcorn like candy made from sweet potatoes, a melon pastry, some crackers, and other small delicacies.
From there we got a couple more items from nearby shops including a breaded beef mixture that was fried, some raw tuna, fried octopus bites, and some fresh fruit. We took all of these items and a bottle of cold sake and enjoyed them on these small picnic table in front of a liquor store. It's something that on a normal day Jenn and I would probably never do but on a food tour, it just works. There wasn't one bite of food that either of us didn't like. Jenn, of course, loved the fried beef but more surprising is her absolute love for tuna. Speaking of the tuna, the old couple that owned the fresh fish store we got the tuna from said that Jenn looked like Ivanka Trump. Jenn who hates Ivanka almost as much as she hates Donald was not having any of that and made for a pretty great scene of four people (Jenn and I along with two Japanese folks in their late 70's) laughing hysterically about the insanity of Trump and his daughter. Both of which who were scheduled to visit Japan while we're here. We found out from Meg that like in the US, most people are not big fans of our current President.
After our picnic and sake, we were off. We made the next stop at a small ramen shop. There we split a bowl of ramen and had some dumplings. Jenn's not a big fan of dumplings, so I ate those while Jenn had most of the ramen. The broth was completely different then any other ramen we've had before, and the noodles were made from whole wheat which was really great. It was a stellar ramen, and although by this point we were getting full we enjoyed every slurp of it.
At this point, I was hitting my limit of food. Luckily we had a little bit of a walk and a coffee stop where Jenn and I both had iced lattes to help settle our stomach. Our final stop was at a small cafe in an old 100-year old Japanese house where we had to die for fried chicken and cold sake. I'll be honest we drank a lot yesterday and just as much today. But really what are vacations for? We sat on tradition mats, talked about life, Japanese politics and work habits, and other great food options to try in Japan. The tour ended a little before 2 PM when Meg dropped us off at the subway station. We've done a lot of food tours and this one was really special. The food was great, the neighborhood was fascinating, and the tour was fun and really interesting.
With our bellies full we decided to forgo taking the subway to our next stop and instead walked the 45-minutes to Asakusa Station. There at 3 PM, we had a rickshaw tour. We made it there a little early and after searching the area we came across the sign for Ebisuya Rickshaw. A couple of minutes later we boarded a rickshaw with Taka who dragged us around for a half an hour of the nearby area including the Sensoji Temple, a geisha town, and several other small cool little spots. The whole experience was both incredibly fun but also sort of terrible. We felt so bad having such a nice guy drag us around town. Luckily Taka was a ton of fun and gave us a lot of interesting insights along the way.
After we left Taka and his rickshaw we were off to explore the Sensoji temple a little more. The sun was just going down (as you can see in the pictures) and so we explored that area for a while taking a ton of amazing photos and enjoying a beautiful cool evening.
From there we hopped back on the subway with our bellies full and went back to our hotel. We were both exhausted so we got back to our room a little after 7 PM and called it a night. Although we didn't get to experience the nightlife as much as we did the night before, today was another great day of amazing places to visit and a plethora of incredible cuisine.
