Addis Last Day in Tokyo

I really didn’t do very much today.

After breakfast a group of us went to a mall called Sunshine City where we went to the Mega Pokemon store to grab some souvenirs for our friends and family. (I video called my sister as soon as the store was open and took her on a virtual tour of the mega store so she could pick out her own gift. Lol.)

It was raining so some of the trains in the subways had delays and whatnot. I also noticed that they have women only cars on the trains during rush hour to make women feel more comfortable about potential gropers.

Although this does nothing for the a typical yaoi train groping scenes, I thought it was kind of cool that they want women to feel comfortable on their way to work.

So at around 11 am, I went to go meet one of the girls from ExR who lives in Tokyo, Jyoujimi. We had decided to meet up for some ramen or tsukemen at noon. The place she chose to take us to was in the mall system in Skytree tower. When we arrived there was a line, so we figured it must be pretty good.

When the waitress was passing out the menus, she turned to my best friend, (who is Asian) and started speaking Japanese. Since both Jyoujimi and me are whiter than sour cream, I guess she thought my best friend was showing us around Tokyo. Lol. She was so surprised when Jyoujimi answered her in fluent Japanese instead.

It wasn’t too long of a wait, maybe 20 minutes from the time in line to the time our food arrived.

This was bomb. I got the spicy tsukemen and since Jyoujimi doesn’t like eggs, she gave me hers.

For those of you who don’t know, tsukemen is the summer time ramen. The noodles come off to the side and are chilled. You dip the noodles in a condensed dashi broth which is hot. This makes it so during the summer, when you eat it, the meal is more of the human body temperature instead of hot.

The tsukemen dipping sauce was not salty and had so much flavor it is indescribable. Just so much umami. The red paste on the side is a spice that I added to mine since I love spicy food. I probably added about half of it to my bowl and it was the perfect level of spicy.

As Jyoujimi said (after translating what the waiter said), “You can ask for more soup to add to your soup to make it more soupy.” XD

What they mean is that the tsukemen dipping dashi is thicker than a normal ramen soup dashi and is too condensed to drink straight by itself. So once you finish dipping off all of your noodles, you can ask for the broth they add to their ramen to thin out the dipping dashi so you can drink it. I didn’t do this, but it made a lot of sense for those who wanted a hot soup to drink at the end.

At this point, my best friend split off from Jyoujimi and me because she was going back to Akihabara with one of the other girls in our group. So Jyoujimi and I decided to check out all 6 floors of the Skytree mall while we chatted.

There were so many different things in that mall. I didn’t want to be hella touristy and take a picture of everything I thought was cool, so I only got a few things.

The two pictured above are actually those fake acrylic food that stores in Tokyo use to show exactly what you are eating. These fake foods look so real it’s kind of frightening.

Before Jyoujimi and I split up, we grabbed some ice cream. She got strawberry when I grabbed the matcha.

It was so much better than the kind you can find in the states. It had more of a green tea flavor and less of a milk flavor. The cone was a “salt cone” which wasn’t sweet and made the matcha actually stand out more.

At this point, it was already around 2pm and the two of us decided to go our separate ways. It was so nice to actually meet up with one of my ExR girls in real life. It makes them more of a person and less of a face behind the screen.

This was the fun part. Lol. Trying to get back to the hotel by myself. A lot of the Japanese people I passed looked at me strangely when I used the subway system by myself. I guess having my best friend with me on previous days made us stand out less. But since I was a random white girl in a sea of Asians, I stood out a lot more.

It was about 3pm by the time I arrived at the hotel, and since, for the first time in almost 3 days, I was by myself, I decided to catch up on all the yaoi I had missed since leaving the states.

Due to the jet lag, my cold, and finally being by myself without someone snoring in the room, I fell asleep. I slept for about 4 hours, missed out on every one going to dinner together and am actually currently deciding what I should do for food at 8pm. I might hit up the local convenience store less than a block away and grab a bento, or I might just skip food completely and go back to sleep after taking some Nyquil.

Overall, I really enjoyed the three days we spent in Tokyo. I think, if I were to come back again, I would probably only stay 4 or 5 days max anyway because you can do everything available within that time frame. Any longer, and you might not find it as new and exciting.

We leave our Tokyo hotel tomorrow morning at 8.30am to head for Hakone. We should get there around 5.30pm after visiting Mount Fuju etc, where our next hotel is actually a traditional Japanese styled inn.

I’ll get the next two releases out at 6am tomorrow, but meanwhile, I think I need some food.

Thanks for reading,

Addis