Travel, Part 2 (Patreon)

After my previous Japan post, I was getting a bunch of questions about the trip, so I figured I'd share a little more. To save time, I'm not going to just write this out and not be super careful about typos. I'm also not going to be super careful about editing and resizing the pictures. You've been warned!

Many people have asked about food. One of my favorite places was a hole in the wall place in Shibuya that basically only served salt-encrusted white fish and salmon cooked over charcoal. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of the place:

Just fish, rice, soup, and seaweed, but sometimes simpler is better!

My favorite place for sushi was a place we found in Shinjuku. It didn't have an English name on the signs, so I'm not even sure what the place was called.

Unlike most places, this one had so many choices for fish. Like 5 different cuts of salmon with different levels of fattiness, similar for the blue fin tuna, sea bream, 3 different types of eel. Overall, there were something like 40 different cuts of fish to try and everything I had was amazing. I didn't get any good picture of the fish, but I did take a video of the inside which was really unique. It was arranged in 3 large staggered bars that formed U-shapes around the sushi chefs. What I'll probably do is upload the videos as separate Patreon posts.

We of course ate a lot of different stuff and all of it was incredible. The last thing I want to mention that was especially unique was the "Himokawa Udon" which uses wide noodles instead of the typical shape. I had never tried this. It had an especially chewy texture, and I cannot recommend enough searching out for it when you are in Japan! Here's a picture, but I didn't do a very good job of highlighting the the noodles, sorry!

Amongst the other things we did, there was the teamLab Planets museum, which is a super unique interactive museum. Here is one of the rooms you can experience, and this picture definitely does not do it justice!

Some other examples was a lake you walk through with virtual fish swimming through the water, and if you step on the fish they explode into flowers. Another room you sat on your back and an amazing display of virtual flowers float by you. You could also draw a picture and then set the picture crawling away from you to be part of the exhibit. It's all hard to describe, and there was way more than I'm mentioning here, so you just have to see it yourself to really understand.

We of course also visited the Pokémon Center and Cafe. The variety of Pokémon stuffed animals you could get was incredible. They had almost every obscure Pokémon you could ever want.

The food in the Pokémon Cafe was all Pokémon themed. There were meals shaped like Snorlax, Pikachu or Charizard. Not super appetizing, but really creative. I thought I had pictures, but maybe my wife took them all, so I don't readily have them right now.

One last thing to mention was the Tokyo Giants baseball game. We sat in the cheering section. What that means is that we were basically standing on our feet and cheering whenever the Giants were batting. I'll post a short video to give you an idea, but it was exhausting by the end of the night! The funny part is that the visiting team had their own section, and we would politely sit whenever it was the other teams turn to cheer. Everything in Japan is so polite! The were cheerleaders, and there were 3 cheerleaders from the other team that got to cheer alongside the other team. Every time the two teams would shake hands, people would cheer encouragement for being so polite. They even had a small section where you could buy merch for the visiting time.

Those are the main things that stick out to me a couple of weeks since the trip. I still need to post about MagicCon Vegas!