Navigating Tokyo using Google Maps is more of a guessing game than you would expect. It’s not uncommon to see Google directing you to walk straight into a wall.
The city is full of elevated passageways, and most public spaces are well-mapped. This means Google will route you through shopping malls, train stations and other public facilities. When you’re at street level, and the directions tell you to go through a wall, look up, and you’ll likely see a passageway or simply a building with a set of stairs allowing you through.
Our day started with a stop at our neighbourhood train station. Before we left, we ordered a set of rail passes. These are suitable for the vast majority of metro, local, and bullet trains. Any train without reserved seating, you mainly step on it, or so we’re led to believe. For the Shinkansen, however, you have to stop at the Japan Rail (JR for short) ticket office to get your reserved seating ticket. We expected a hard time communicating our plans to the gentleman at the ticket counter. Still, we found that searching for the itinerary we wanted on our phone (the Japan Official Travel App is a must for this) and asking for the ticket got us what we wanted with no communication errors or misunderstandings.
Finding pictures of what you want to eat (or where you want to go) and pointing at them is a totally normal way to say what you want. It could be pictures from Instagram, Google Map review pictures or the menu. Pretty much nobody expects you to understand their script.
With our tickets in hand, we made our way to where the fish market had stood. There’s still a vast array of stalls, but you don’t get to see people selling whole tuna on wooden planks in a warehouse.
Breakfast was composed of Sushi with, of course, fatty tuna (Otoro). It’s hard to get outside Japan, so we’re taking every opportunity to have some. The sushi bar experience is also excellent for breakfast. You sit at the counter. The sushi man, closest to you, asks what you want and places it in front of you as you order. You get to order a little, see if you’re still hungry, and order some more. There was a lineup at the door, and still our orders came in minutes. All of this comes with a bottomless pot of green tea.
There are three fattiness levels for tuna in Japan:
- akami: the red meat, what we see in our sushi at home,
- chūtoro: medium fat, feels like a very juicy piece of tuna with a softer taste
- ōtoro: full fat, it is to our tuna what Wagyu beef is to a minute steak.
After breakfast, we took advantage of the beautiful day and walked from the fish market to the Imperial Palace and visited the East Gardens (pretty much the only thing you can freely visit there). On our way, we stopped at one of the omnipresent vending machines to grab a bottle of cold green tea. One will never go thirsty while walking the streets, as vending machines at every corner offer a wide selection of beverages.
As we walked further, we noticed the one thing that’s absent from the Tokyo streets: garbage cans. There’s nowhere to dispose of your empty bottle. After an embarrassingly long time, we figured out that most of the vending machines have a garbage/recycling can next to it. Not all of them are most.
The imperial palace gardens are like a small starter plate for what we’ll see on our vacation. Each section (rose garden, bamboo garden, etc.) is between 10 and 20 square meters. It’s still a beautiful park and worth visiting if you’re near it, but we’re far from any botanical garden.
We finished the day with ramen for dinner. Ramen is a serious thing around here. There are even Michelin Star ramen restaurants that stay true to the affordable nature of such places. We landed at Ippudo, a chain with about 80 locations in Japan. Their ramen comes in three kinds: classic, modern and spicy. We went spicy because they looked delicious, and they lived up to the look. They were spicy enough to get your nose running by the end, but not enough to hide any of the flavour.
