At school we had a whole week off for Chuseok break this year (the annual Korean holiday often compared to the USA's Thanksgiving due to focus on food and family, but with an additional component of honoring ancestors) and Alan Goral was kind enough to take the time to meet me in Tokyo and spend a week wandering around Japan together. We realized we have been friends now for 50 years!
Due to the fact that the whole country had this week off, travel reservations were kinda tight and I ended up booking a strange flight which had me leaving Incheon Saturday evening but not arriving in Tokyo until Sunday morning, with a 12 hour layover in the S. Korean city of Daegu, which is in the southern central part of S. Korea about an hour flight from here.
Predictions were for heavy crowds at the airport but still I had some time to kill so I went for a walk in a park on the Han river north of here before heading to the airport. Here's a picture from the park before I left:
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| Hanging out before heading to the airport. |
Then I got to the airport super early (about 4:30 pm for a 7:30 flight). and discovered that because the first leg of my flight was domestic I didn't even have to deal with the main departure arrival for international flights (and security/immigration checks there) but had to go to the domestic departure area which is just a little corner of the main floor where all the arrivals occur. There are only, I think, 2 domestic gates, and I had to wait around to even check in. After the counter finally opened and I checked in I still had about an hour and a half to kill before boarding began. So I rode the monorail which goes a short distance from the airport to an area near where the ferry is to the southern island I'd been to a few weeks prior and I had some dinner there. It was a pretty amazing dinner. The picture below is just of the accompaniments! (before they even brought the mackerel I'd ordered along with some soup and rice). A boatload of accompaniments is typical of Korean dining-out.
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| The accompaniments for a restaurant meal are a meal in themselves! |
I finally arrived in Daegu about 8:30 where I had made reservations at the "Airport Hotel" which is actually attached to the airport. So I checked in there, set my alarm, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning to this view out my window:
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| It's not called the Airport Hotel for nothing! |
Then a walk back to the terminal part of the airport and I took about a 2 hr flight to Tokyo, during which I was able to see Mt. Fuji rising out of the clouds before we landed. I landed about 10:30 am and bought a train ticket to station near the hotel Alan had booked for us for the first two nights. When I got to the hotel it was too early to check in so I left my backpack there and walked about 3-4 km north to the main Tokyo railroad station where I needed to exchange my voucher for a JR Railpass which Alan and I had both bought so we would have unlimited train rides for a week. We also got the "green" upgrade which gave us access to the first class "green cars" with reserved seating. This turned out to be a pretty nice deal. On my way back to the hotel I stopped for a bowl of curry soup at nice small place where there was a line to get in.
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| Streets of downtown Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon |
Finally I checked into our hotel and waited for Alan to arrive.
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| View from our hotel room in Mitsui Gardens Hotel |
Alan arrived about 6:00 and after a celebratory beer we went out looking for some dinner, walking back up north of the hotel in the same direction I'd gone earlier in the afternoon, and eventually finding a really nice little place where we had a feast, beginning with the hugest oysters we ever saw. We had seen various types of oysters on the menu and we were asking about them (like, was that price per dozen, or per half-dozen, and which ones did they recommend) and we found out that price was per each! So we each had two, plus a nice snapper entree, and we shared a bottle of wine. It was a nice noisy yet cozy (small) restaurant and the staff was very friendly and one party was celebrating a birthday and everyone seemed to enjoy it when Alan and I joined in singing happy birthday.
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| Alan having a huge oyster. |
The next morning we started out walking to a large formal historic garden very near our hotel. It was a lovely place to spend a Monday morning as you will see in the pictures below and it had a traditional tea house in it where we had some tea. It would have been even nicer if there hadn't been an army of groundskeepers using leaf blowers everywhere we went. The noise reminded me of weekends in Washington Park!
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| At the tea house. |
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| Notice the spider in the middle of this picture. Those Asian spiders are serious! Good thing I'm not an arachnophobe. |
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| I forgot what these are called but I know I had lots of them on High Street. |
We left the garden and walked to a train station and started learning how to navigate that and were successful in getting on a train taking us a little ways northeast of the main station to a part of the city called Ueno where we walked around looking for some lunch.
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| Street market in Ueno. |
We eventually found a really nice place for lunch.
After lunch we walked back the way we'd come and continued observing all the sights of the street market. It's mostly the usual amazing Asian street market scenes (all sorts of, to me, exotic seafood, mushrooms, vegetables, etc...) which I'm still impressed by but have come to expect to some degree. However, I don't remember seeing these particular things (being grilled below) which I don't even know what they are, but I was not tempted to try one.
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| What are these? |
Eventually we made it to a regular park (as opposed to the formal gardens of the morning) near the station we'd arrived at, which also had several museums in it, none of which we felt like visiting. Instead we opted for a little quiet post-lunch time. I was laying on a stone bench at the top of a hill looking up at the trees and listening to an interesting street-performance down below from a guy who had a kind of drum set which also included marimba-like aspects.
I had hoped to capture some of the street music in this video. If you listen closely you can hear some of it but it's not really representative of the more elaborate parts. Different 'songs' seemed to start out pretty simply and get more and more complex as they went along. This must have been at a beginning part.
Next we went back to our hotel to rest up from our resting up in the park and Alan found a recommendation for a dinner place that was supposed to be really good called "Andy's" where supposedly you needed reservations unless you got there right when it opened so that's what we set out to do. It was right underneath the railroad tracks (as were several other businesses) near one of the stations we'd been to earlier that day so we rode the train back up there and wandered around for a while and eventually found it and were lucky to get seated. Even though it looks nearly empty in the picture below it filled up fast, with mostly men, as opposed to the restaurant we'd been in the first night which was mostly women.
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| Indeed, Andy's was excellent and we had another meal that couldn't be beat. Sashima was one (delicious) theme of the week. |
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| No, this isn't an extreme close-up, it's just huge asparagus. |
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| Our first tempura! But it wouldn't be our last. |
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| Starting to fill up now. |
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| I enjoyed edamame on several occasions though Alan wasn't as big a fan. |
After dinner we walked back toward, then finally past, our hotel to an area we'd strolled through earlier on the way to dinner (because we'd gone to a train station south of our hotel to ride up to the station where Andy's was) because we'd spotted several nice-looking spots for an after dinner drink and/or bite. Amazingly, I was still hungry so I got some chicken (and fries).
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| Yummy bar food! |
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| My first shochu, which is, I think, a Japanese version of soju (which we have here in Korea) |
Thusly ended our first full day in Japan and we retired again to our room with plans to try the hotel breakfast the next morning before heading out to catch a train westward toward the little (relatively speaking) town of Hakone near Mr. Fuji. But I will save that part of the story for next time. Sayonara for now!
