More Tokyo

On the list of places we ended up visiting was the Yebisu beer museum. To be honest, it was a bit of a letdown in that (a) the "museum" was in fact a room of pictures on the wall, and (b) the beer tasting was not free! Free beer is the real motivation to go to a brewery! But we enjoyed it anyways and paid for a few beers. 

Beer tasting room.

One thing that was a consistent problem when I lived in Tokyo was eating in restaurants. I speak just enough Japanese to get around in touristy areas and be polite when asking for beers and the location of bathrooms- but thats it- and I know virtually no kanji characters. So this makes ordering from a menu a little tricky. Luckily the Japanese love to put plastic pretend food in their display cases, so its often possible, albeit embarrassing, to resort to the pointing method. Although we stayed in a pretty touristy area, we still had occasional difficulty find places to eat and subsequently ordering. The first night we hit the lost in translation jackpot when we happened upon a place that unbeknown to us had a set menu which included free flowing beer. We wondered why they were being so aggressive about refilling our beers- but seriously, who is going to complain about never empty beer glasses? With my Singapore mentality, I was getting a little nervous about the damage that the beer free for all was going to cause to our bill- but was pleasantly surprise to realize when the bill came that the beer was FREE. This was true luck. 

On our last night we set out to eat a sukiyake/shabu shabu restaurant- food so good it would be a crime to leave Japan with out eating it. We finally found the place, and were the only ones there! They kindly kept open just for us and we had the BEST meal ever. 

For those of you who are not familiar with sukiyaki, it involves very thinly sliced beef, lightly grilled at your table in a soy sauce and then dipped in raw egg. The raw egg part may seem a little creepy, but its sooooo good. Sometimes they leave you to your own devices on the cooking, but we had a lovely little old lady doing the cooking for us and delivering the perfect bites to our egg bowls. 

A happy man. 

It was a big hit. 

On our last day we took our to explore Odiaba- something I remember being very cool when I lived in Tokyo. I forgot to look what time things opened, so we ended up there a little on the early time with some time to kill- but thanks to the global domination of Starbucks, we were not with out a place to wait out the morning. 

The big Odiaba plan was to end up taking a boat along the Sumida- ending up back at Asakusa for some last minute shopping in the market. When I did this very thing four years ago, I ended up on a totally normal looking little flat boat- nothing particularly exciting about it. This is the boat we got to ride:

The Jetsons boat. 

Dave on the Jetsons boat. There would be more pictures, but true to my nature, the gentle motion of the boat put me to sleep. No big loss- I'd already seen it once.