Hello all, I had a lovely lovely day and took lots of photos and isn't this just special?
Started out by Skyping relatively briefly with mum & Magnus; my family's going to be here in less than 3 weeks and I am so excited good gracious.
Then I went and had a traditional Osaka style lunch with Keiko (I teach her English, Takashi (her husband), and Yuriko (their daughter) in Shinjuku. It was so interesting!
I can't say I fell in love with any of the food honestly, but it was all good. And like I said, it was terribly interesting. Aaaaand I can tick 'eat octopus' off my bucket list, so, booyah.
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| kind of like a quiche ball with octopus inside it. |
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| vinegar based dipping sauce for the octopus. |
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| soy sauce, vinegar, and some kind of hot sauce all mixed: for the gyoza. |
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| Takashi cutting this thing that they said 'is like an osaka pizza', but I saw little connection there. |
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| it was the best thing I had, though! |
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| served with dried seaweed and smoked tuna flakes. |
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| soba, of course. with cabbage, chicken, and pickled ginger. |
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| sort of a tasteless pudding with brown sugar (which just tasted like molasses to me) sauce. |
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| where we ate! |
Went straight from there to Asakusa to go to Sensoji which is a very famous Buddhist temple.
There's also a temple dedicated to tanuki there which is like half the reason I went, but then I couldn't find it! Sneaky. I will do some research and go again because I will not leave Tokyo without going to it, I swear.
As you can see it was packed, but it was so worth going. Had a bit of a spiritual moment with all the incense and the people praying and tossing coins into various offering things and it was so good.
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| tokyo skytree |
After that I walked around the area for a while, got a few little presents and just enjoyed looking about. I don't seem to wander as much as I did when I first got here, I suppose that's natural since Tokyo's less… new and thrilling now.
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| The arcade leading to Sensoji. |
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| grilled squid |
Took a slightly complicated train journey to Minato so I could go to Nissin for a few western food stuffs, came back, made some chilli for dinner and then skyped with Liam for a while.
We talked about exciting plans and it was just generally a really nice way to end my really nice day.
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I hope you all have a good day and a pleasant tomorrow!
