We
started this day with a breakfast at Yoshinoya, before walking a
little bit to Kanda station in order to get a direct train to
Kichijoji, where we visited the Ghibli Museum. Anime is not my thing,
but for anime-lovers Ghibli is one of the best studio's around and
the museum itself was quite nice, and pretty exclusive as there are
only a limited amount of tickets sold each day.
After Ghibli we headed back to Kichijoji through the beautiful Inokashira-koen (park) with shrines in it and koifish swimming in the lakes and visited the shoppingarea of Kichijoi afterwards. Although i've never heared about Kichijoji before, this wasn't definitely not a boring suburb. Lots of shops, small really narrow streets and the steakhouse where we looking for to get some cheap Matsuzaka steak for lunch. More about that in the restaurant-summary at the end of the blog ;) From Kichijoji we went on to another Tokyo suburb, Shimo-Kitazawa, which was recommended in the Lonely Planet and on our route, so why not ;) This suburb was a little more flashy than Kichijoji, more shops for hip urban kids, more arcadehalls and so on. Nice to spend a couple of hours, and so did we, before taking a small break at the hotelroom to refresh. Fresh as can be we went to Akihabara, Tokyo's geek paradise. And although most geeks live with their mom, and their mom cleans after their asses, their shops looked rather messy. Too messy for our taste, so after walking around for a bit we headed for a mall to get some ramendinner to end this day with a walk from Akihabara back to our hotel through the Tokyo heat.
As
for the restaurants: Yoshinoya is a big 24/7 Japanse fastfood chain
with their beefbowl (marinated beefslices on top of some rice) as
their number one. For breakfast they have some special menu's, mine
consisted out of ham/eggs, some salade, misosoup, some of the
beefslices, some veggies, and offcourse: rice., all for just 5€.
Satou Steakhouse is a famous steakhouse in Kichijoji where people
line outside for their fried meatballs. Upstairs they have a
restaurant with about 16 seats, that sells steaks ranging from
25-100€ (between 150 and 200 grams) at night, with a really
affordable lunchmenu with some cheaper cuts of the Matsuzaka-beef for
10-20€. Really tender beef, served with quite a few side dishes:
beansprouts, pickles, salad, some sauces and... white rice. At the
Akiba-mall the 'food-court' consisted out of different small
restaurants, and we choose for a ramen-restaurant, to avoid the white
rice this time. The 10€ bowl with fish/beef broth and all the
condiments kept us eating for 20 minutes, even while we were sharing
the bowl. Japanese guys half my size and weight finish these bowls in
5 minutes. Crazy!
Off to day 5&6!
Off to day 5&6!