It rained! It poured! We took a cab to breakfast instead of walking the 14 minutes from from our hotel. That’s how I got my credit card suspended by BMO as no act of laziness goes unpunished, but more on that later. When I said it poured I mean 4 o’clock tropical rain level. It was noisy and you couldn’t walk more than a block without getting water in your shoes and your pants sticking to your thighs and shins.
Thanks to our cab we made it to breakfast at Sushi Zanmai in the old fish market (Tsukiji Market). We got there as it’s close and we’re told the portions of fish are bigger there. When it comes to chutōro and, specially, ōtoro tuna, bigger is better. Sushi for breakfast remains at the top of my list of why Japan (Tokyo at least) is awesome.
After breakfast the gray weather got me feeling tired. Sleeping 12 hours a day and essentially eating for the other 12 hours for 7 consecutive days is a tiring job, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
We decided to go back to the hotel and deal with the email I got from BMO’s security department. The rest of Tokyo was feeling exactly like us (lazy) and both taxis and Uber were in high demand. The expected wait for our Uber was 27 minutes for a 13-minute walk or a 9-minute drive. Faced with the choice between waiting under an awning for half an hour or walking in the rain for 13 minutes, we went with walking. Boy did we get wet. Thanks to our hard shell our core, arms and head remained warm and dry but pretty much everything else was drenched.
As promised, my rant. So my credit card is called a MasterCard World Elite card. Not too sure why it’s called Elite, it really just means you have travel insurance built-in. It’s marketed to people who travel. As you might have guessed, I do travel quite a bit so I fall directly in their target market. It is the second time my card is suspended while I travel. The first time I was in Europe buying plane tickets from the local airline. It was a not an insubstantial purchase I’ll grant you but, still, fits within what somebody who travels would do. This time, when the local taxi app (JapanTaxis) took the 0.01$ payment to ensure that the card was valid, the security algorithm went all: “oh no! Some taxi company in Japan might be used to commit a fraud and I must protect my customer who’s been in that country for days now; better block his card and make him call us”.
I have to send thanks to BMO for teaching me how to dial internationally. This time around I’ve learned that the easiest way is to go with +1 then the number. The + replaces the international dialing code. To make it on an iPhone just hold 0.
Anyway, after 15 minutes waiting on the line and a 5-minute conversation where everyone involved avoided pointing out the irony of protecting a traveler from a 0.01$ fraud in a country well known for its low crime rate, I was allowed to use my card again.
With the rain still going we forwent going to the modern art museum and waited for it to stop for a couple of hours. We watched Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations episode on Osaka and learned that people in Osaka have a word for “eating until ruin” and they seem quite food centric. Our kind of people! We also made our second restaurant reservation of the trip to have Kobe Beef in Kobe. How much more meta can you get?
The rain finally stopped a little after 15:00. We jumped into our wet shoes and headed to a nearby tea house to have a little something to eat and drink plenty of tea while waiting for dinner time.
Diner was Yakitori, grilled skewers of a great many things. As they grill at the bar the restaurant is a little smoky and smells of charcoal, evaporated fat and grilled meat. Don’t let that stop you. It’s a fun experience and delicious if a little salty as everything seems marinated in soy sauce. We had duck, chicken wings (open faced on a skewer), peppers, bacon wrapped asparagus (sadly they don’t really know what true bacon is), chicken skin and simply chicken. You’ll notice the repetition of chicken quite a lot as it’s the main meat at a Yakitori. With a delicious side of rice and vegetables it was a great meal.
Tomorrow we’re leaving Tokyo again to make our way to Matsumoto and its castle.