Borat...sorry, Morat

Guess what! I managed to meet my first Uzbekistanian person yesterday. He lives in my halls and his name is Morat!!! How cool is that?!?!?! Anyway apparently there are more Uzbekistanis living here...he knows of at least 5...even better!

Tsukiji Fish Market

No trip to Tokyo is complete with out sushi...and the famous fish market is, well, revered for it's freshness so we thought we'd have to go try...SO, despite Quans jetlag we get up very early and head towards Shimbashi...

Unfortunately, living in Odaiba means that we miss the auctions, which start at 5am (i'm told that you have to be there before 5am to get a look in). Anyway the Yurikamome line's first train is at 530...so No Chance!

Anyhoo, we have a wonder around looking for the famed 'Daiwa Zushi' sushi restaurant, where the guide book tells me is the best place for a sushi brekkie.....mmmmmmm....fishies :D

We wondered around for ages and still could not find where the guide book said Daiwa was...I ened up asking this guy at a stall in very bad Japanese where building 6 was (this is what the guide book gives as an address). Anyway, we were blatently in the wrong place, so we eventually wondered back out of the fish stall bit...trying to avoid being run over by the little motorised trolleys zipping about in very tight spaces laden mostly with polystyrene...


A very bad picture of one of the motorised trolly things...

Eventually, after some near misses with some of these trollies, we found Daiwa, along with a very long queue...but i made Quan stand in line...after all the effort of finding the place i wasn't about to leave with out a sushi breakfast! that would be crazy talk...anyway the very carefully organised queuing system was interesting...especially in such a tight space.



After about 45mins of diligent queuing and a couple of minutes of smearing our faces up against the window we managed to get seats at the counter...and then the fun of ordering in Japanese began!

I only knew the word for tuna = maguro, which is great, because i love tuna! but there were different levels of tuna...normal, fatty, and coronary (ie. more fat than fish). But OHMYGOD!!!! the coronary tuna (it's not really called this but Quan was convinced he could feel his arteries tightening after he ate it) was *gorgeous*...aaaaahhhhh...

We also tried some sea urchin...uni...or something like that (I usually end up saying the word for plum instead of sea urchin...which can be interesting). The worst thing was the prawn...not that it tasted bad...it was just the pyschological trauma (not least to the prawn) of eating a 'not-properly-dead-yet' prawn. It was a little too fresh for my liking. And by 'too' fresh I mean that it was having muscle spasms on my little (giri) lump of rice. This was despite it having been beheaded, de-shelled and de-legged. I was trying to wait for it to stop twiching before I ate it. But it kept on twitching too much...and I rather wanted to stop watching...so mr. prawn met a acidic end...

I'm still planning to go again...so any of you planning to visit are more than welcome to request a trip there... ;)

Imperial Palace - Welcoming in the New Year

Yokohama

After a nice little new years in Odaiba we went to Yokohama in the morning in the search for chinese stuff...

A very strange sculpture of shipping containers near the port of Yokohama...

The view of the port of Yokohama... as we were walking along the promenade we watched a pair standing together, one was throwing bread into the air to the seagulls making them catch it in mid air...whilst the other was just grabbing at the birds who were hovering to try and get the food...a couple he actually just ended up hitting away...but then he caught one by the body! The sea gul flapped alot...but calmed down once the other friend (not holding the bird) fed it some bread. The seagull, a bit pissed off, then proceeded to try and free itself by by biting the guys hand with it's beak...when this didn't work it then turned it's head fully around to the guy holding it to try for his face...which was very far away from it's beak but it had a go anyway. Theh guy holding the bird then taunted the seagull by moving his face closer...sticking the cigarette that he was smoking out towards it's beak, which the bird then bit and very quickly realised it was a bad idea.

A very well designed decking area and roof garden to disguise a port terminal.

A bento box full of traditional Japanese new year foods very kindly given to us by a member of YiPings Lab who drove all the way into Yokohama to meet us for about half an hour!