It was our second, and final full day in Tokyo, we’d packed a heap into our first day in Tokyo, trying to make the most of our layover on the way to Europe. Despite a late night out looking at the lights of Tokyo at night, no one slept much past 7am. Who needs sleep when you have so much to do! There was less walking today but a lot of trains….
First up was another convenience store breakfast, the kids love it! Today Anto, Astrid and Soren went to the convenience store to pick up breakfast and coffee. More rice balls, yoghurt drinks and pancakes and crepes. With so little time in Tokyo we didn’t bother with cooking, and the kids list of foods they wanted to try was longer than the time we had!
Tsujiki Outer Market
Then it was time to head out for the day, and see how much we could fit in before our legs dropped off from all the walking, or we ran out of time. First was a train to near Ginza, with the first stop the Tsujiki Outer market. On our walk from the train station we wandered past this temple, which was rather pretty. The sun was shining again and while we had jumpers on for the day, with an 8 degree start, it was a nice adjustment from the 30+ degrees Celsius in Canberra to the impending cold of a European Winter.
The kids (and Anto) had been super-keen to visit the Tsukiji Market. The consists of a few blocks of wholesale and retail shops, as well as restaurants crowded along narrow lanes. It is famous for fresh and processed seafood and produce alongside food-related goods such as knives.
When we arrived, even though it was still early at only 9.30am and the market was already extremely crowded. The market is famous as a place for a fresh sushi breakfast or lunch at one of the local restaurants, which typically open from 5 in the morning to around noon or early afternoon. Because most of the fish served and sold at Tsukiji Outer Market is delivered directly from Toyosu Market, it is one of the best places in Tokyo to enjoy fresh seafood. A fact that the rest of the family were keen on, but not so much me 🙂
There was so much food the kids wanted to try, despite having just had breakfast. They started with some fresh sashimi. They all declared it to be amazing…..
Next up was tanghulu, similar to glace fruit, that they all loved except Astrid struggled with her braces despite hanging out for one.
Soren and Zinnia then conned us into letting them spend some pocket money on Japaense glass ball drinks. They thoroughly enjoyed them and had to extract the marbles which we then had to carry all over Europe for the rest of our trip!
We could have tried plenty of other things but we’d only just had breakfast, so weren’t exactly hungry (not that it was deterring the kids). The crowds were rather insane and we were surprised we hadn’t managed to lose a kid. Anto had again been perusing the many knife stores but still couldn’t decide what he wanted with the overwhelming choice. Running out of time on this trip we declared that he’d just have to come back to Japan.
Ginza and the Art Aquarium
Next we walked into Ginza, a quite different neighbourhood to others we’d explored the previous day.
The one thing I had really wanted to do in Tokyo, the Art Aquarium Museum, a goldfish museum. This place was awesome! Amazing art displays with tanks of goldfish, with changing lighting and music.
Each tank was it’s own work of art and the tanks were arranged in different displays with many different colours, music and explanations of all the art pieces and what they represented. The fish were gorgeous and it was peaceful to watch them swimming about in their tanks.
Astrid and Soren were also having a wonderful time and took a million photos and videos, and I took about a million and 1! Everywhere you looked there was another amazing display. Both Soren and Zinnia were having fun naming particular fish. Soren had a favourite fish ‘Geoffrey’ who ended up in quite a few videos.
Being the start of December we did love that some of the tanks and decorations were Christmas themed….
I’d wanted to go to the Art Aquarium since I’d found out about it months before and it did not disappoint. I could have spent hours there observing the fish and taking photos. After initially being quite excited by the fish Zinnia’s jet lag, and general lack of sleep, kicked in and she was requiring a lot of management by Anto. Luckily the kids were free admission, so they definitely got their money’s worth.
Reluctantly, with a tired Zinnia and plenty on our to do list, we had to leave but it was definitely worth the visit. There were so many beautiful colours, shapes and motion. Soren was also rather sad to say goodbye to his fish Geoffrey.
A bento lunch
On our afternoon agenda was a visit to the Sensō-ji Temple in Asakusa. We were all hungry (finally!) so jumped on a train to Asakusa with a plan to eat before visiting the temple.
We found a restaurant with traditional floor seating that seemed popular but didn’t have huge lines. The kids enjoyed the floor seats and shoes off and it made a nice change from convenience store food.
The staff spoke little English so google translate and Astrid’s Japanese got a good workout! Astrid used her Japanese skills to try find me something vegetarian to eat. Everyone had various Bento boxes, and mine helpfully had the whitebait on the side 🙂 Even Zinnia who ‘absolutely wasn’t hungry and didn’t want lunch’ did eventually eat some and declared it very tasty.
Sensō-ji Temple
All full again, next was the 150m walk to the Sensō-ji temple, an ancient Buddhist temple in Asakusa. It is Tokyo’s oldest-established temple, and one of its most significant. It is dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Structures in the temple complex include the main hall, a five-story pagoda and large gates. It is reportedly the most widely visited religious site in the world with over 30 million visitors annually.
We’d been told the temple was very busy, and worse on the weekends. It was a Tuesday, but the temple was incredibly busy as expected.
We had a look through the markets where the kids found more food they wanted to try despite just having had lunch, and they had to be talked down from wanting to purchase every second thing.
We enjoyed seeing the beautiful traditional costumes everywhere. Those in traditional dress were happily having their photos taken and posing for plenty of selfies.
As we checked out the temple and Soren was fascinated by the fortune games people were playing and declared he hated the smell of incense….
The crowds in the temple weren’t quite as bad as the markets but there were plenty of people about, so we had a bit of a wander through and admired the buildings and artwork.
The kids all decided to play in the water fountains as they desperately needed to wash their hands 🙂 They weren’t the only children that seemed to have the same need…….
Some Tokyo Uniqlo…
It was now a beautiful 17 degrees so a perfect afternoon for try and squish in a bit more sight-seeing in our remaining few hours in Tokyo.
With a quick check of our itinerary for the day we realised we’d been planning to visit the Uniqlo flagship store in Ginza. In our apparent hunger when leaving the Art Aquarium we had somehow skipped this and headed straight for lunch. Anto decided he really did want to check out the Uniqlo store and it turns out that the lunch restaurant was good, so a bit of back tracking wasn’t the end of the world. So there were some more trains and we were back in Ginza…..
We’d heard Uniqlo was cheap in Japan and yep, so cheap! Given half our trip wardrobe is Uniqlo if we had of thought about it months ago we would have waited and come over with empty suitcases for our Winter wardrobe to be purchased at half the price.
They also have coffee on the 12th floor with great views so that amused us while we were drinking our coffees.
We restricted ourselves to a scarves for Soren and Astrid as they hadn’t bought there giant ones from home, and a cute jumper for Zinnia to match one of Astrid’s that we’d bought for 4 times the price on sale. Soren’s scarf was another item that somehow went missing during the trip. Astrid’s did make it home!
Soren also had an interesting experience with the Uniqlo toilets when he pushed too many buttons and got to experience the bidet functions, much to his surprise!
Cool cars and missing kids….
Walking back to the train station we happened past some Nissan concept cars that Soren insisted we go look at.
Soren was not keen to leave the cool cars but we reminded him next on the agenda was the One Piece store at Shibuya so he did eventually allow us to exit the building.
On our walk to the train station Soren somehow got separated from the rest of us crossing a busy intersection. Cue about 4 minutes of panic from all of us as his phone was in Anto’s bag, and he was nowhere to be seen. He eventually reemerged from a train station (where we had been headed). Luckily he stopped when he realised he didn’t have his transport card……. or seemingly the rest of his family! He was a bit panicked but did the right thing, although caused extra grey hairs for his parents.
Shibuya and more One Piece….
We had agreed to fit in Soren’s request to head back to Shibuya to visit the One Piece official store. We hadn’t managed to get to there the night before as it had closed by the time we had dinner (we hadn’t realised it closed at 9pm as we had intended to be there earlier). Soren’s One Piece obsession meant we spent another 40 minutes on trains to head back to Shibuya.
Lucky we like him as we felt like we spent a lot of time on trains during the day and it was a bit of a hike for him to do some souvenir shopping.
We did arrive in Shibuya just before sunset so got some pretty cool photos and the kids loved watching the people drive the real life Mario Karts around the streets, all in their dress-up outfits. They had researched this activity and were disappointed you have to be 18 and have a drivers licence or it would have been on their agenda.
We also got another look at all the crazy neon signs at Shibuya crossing and got the cross that intersection another couple of times, and yes there were just as many people as the day before.
Soren had a hard time deciding which precious items he wanted but we eventually negotiated a few souvenir purchases. There was so much choice and a lot of holiday to go to stretch the pocket money on.
By now it was after 5.30pm. We had just got a message that Di and Max had landed in Tokyo and were, ready to head to Paris with us the next day.
It was across that damn Shibuya crossing one last time for this trip and off the catch yet another train!
One last Tokyo dinner…
From Shibuya it was another 35 minutes on trains back to Chiyoda, where our apartment was. Lucky we love Soren, we could have lived without that afternoon detour for souvenirs!
Our whirlwind Tokyo stop was coming to an end. We did some quick packing up before heading out to dinner. We’d put Astrid in charge of dinner research while we were packing with instructions of something nearby and local cuisine. She found a small Katsu restaurant within a 5 minute walk. It turned out this place was both tiny (about 8 seats) and the chef/owner didn’t speak any English. With some google translate and Astrid’s limited Japanese we did establish there was nothing I could eat, the poor chef wasn’t happy as he wanted me to order his food and he was quite put out I wouldn’t eat pork, fish OR clams. He was very disappointed in me!
In the end we ordered for the other 4, a combination of the only other 3 dishes on the menu: fish, a 3 piece pork and 2 schnitzel katsu’s. The tired kids who didn’t want to eat, devoured it and all declared it the best katsu ever.
Even now they still talk about this meal and want to go back to the this restaurant on our next Japan trip. After watching the others eat, I was feeling hungry so we head back via a convenience store to pick up some tempura and soba noodle dinner for me, which was significantly less interesting than everyone else’s dinner.
The kids were bundled up to bed (floor beds and all) upon arrival back at the apartment as we had a very early alarm. We hadn’t walked quite as far today, more like 10-12km but everyone was still tired and the kids were asleep quickly while the adults got the bags sorted. Some late night packing and Tokyo was nearly done… Next stop Paris!
Up next….
Farewell Japan and unexpected detour over the North Pole with some Northern lights! All finishing the very long day in a cold and Christmasy Paris for baguettes and french cheese 🙂
