My trip’s not quite over yet! I left Busan this morning to take a Jeju Air flight to Tokyo. The only two things of note: Gimhae airport is a lot smaller than I thought, considering Busan has 3.5 million inhabitants (maybe that’s why there aren’t more tourists: they don’t fit!) and it’s SO HOT all of a sudden! It’s been 20°C all day, both in Busan and in Tokyo. I spent so much time agonizing over how many winter clothes to bring, then I was hit with 0°C for a week, and now everything I have is too hot!
After a rather long wait for customs and immigration, and a loooong train ride to Tokyo (it’s easy to forget how far Narita airport is), I finally made it to my hotel in Kanda. I’m staying at a Dormy Inn, because I had a great stay at the one in Kanazawa (you can read about it in this blog!), but… let’s say this is not that! My room is so tiny it’s not even a shoebox, it’s a matchbox! But well, availability was dire when I booked, and anyway with this one you’re clearly paying for the location.
As soon as I’d unpacked, at around 15:30, I left to check out a couple of stores that I had on my to-do list. One thing I’ve missed in Korea is that kind of “beautiful shop” they have here in Japan: stores of handicrafts or artisanal goods or fabrics or anything beautiful and aesthetically pleasing (good because the holidays are just around the corner!).
Well, I had a nice walk around Kanda, which seems mainly business-oriented, but the shops I wanted to see were both closed (turns out today is a bank holiday here. As well as Thanksgiving in the US). I will come back tomorrow, and if it turns out that they are closed for the entire weekend I will be SO MAD.
Out of a plan for the afternoon, it wasn’t worth going to the gardens I have saved for tomorrow, as they were all closing soon or already closed. I opted to visit the closest attraction: Akihabara, the geeky center of Tokyo.
I’ve visited Akihabara every time I’ve been to Tokyo, and it’s always fun to take the temperature of the current anime and videogame culture from whatever’s popular at the time. It was massively crowded, like it always is, but the rush of the masses hit me differently after Korea: it’s a shock, but in a bizarre, twisted way, I also found them comforting, I no longer feel like I didn’t get a memo.
I visited Kotobukiya, my favorite store partly because it has lots of cool stuff, but partly also because it’s way smaller than some of the seven- or eight-floor behemoths nearby. Final Fantasy and Pokemon are permanent fixtures of every shop; Dragon Quest and Evangelion have disappeared (maybe the last Evangelion movie killed off the fandom?), replaced by Persona, Genshin, and other games or anime I’ve never heard of before.
I also went into Animate, and I couldn’t remember why I held it up there with Kotobukiya in my ranking of geeky stores. Today I didn’t find anything of interest, floor after floor of generic stuff. I did like Mandarake, which has a more underground vibe (I remember the one downtown is literally underground). I spent some time at the manga section; I really wouldn’t have minded buying a couple of manga, but I couldn’t find the titles I was looking for if my life depended on it. Books are sorted by the Japanese alphabet, but then they may be sorted by author, or by title, or worst of all, by publishing house, and as for browsing all manga are plastic-wrapped so I can’t peek inside to see if I would understand the Japanese text.
Although I was already tired, I wanted to kill time before dinner, so I powered through Don Quijote, the famous Japanese knickknack store that has everything from cosmetics to kitchen gadgets to food to socks to souvenirs. After Korea, the idea of shopping for cosmetics anywhere else feels almost quaint, but I did like checking out all the different sweets, including the bajillion KitKat flavors. I will be looking to buy some omiyage before I head back!
The moment the clock hit 19:00, I turned south to Kikanbo, the spicy ramen place, with a long line of people waiting for their turn. This was mostly expected, but since it was early, I ducked into my hotel nearby, rested a little bit, then came back to find… pretty much exactly the same line, down maybe two people, but at least now I was a little bit rested and stayed. The line this time around was 100% foreigners, including two separate groups of Spaniards. I heard a lot of Spanish spoken in Akihabara too… Is there a convention and no one told me?!
I’d forgotten that you have to order via a very old, fickle machine and get a ticket before going in. It’s all a bit more work than I’m usually willing to put in for food, to be honest, but this one’s so good that it’s worth it!
The soup has a smoky flavor that I love, the noodles are firm, and since you choose how spicy you want it, the fire always hits just right! A great welcome back to Tokyo. Now, to think of how to fit the three million things I want to do in just two days…
This Is A Lake 