Food, Plastic and Otherwise, in Tokyo

Today was mostly about food. After two straight weeks of living on convenience store food for most of our meals, it was good to be in a place that has some amazing restaurants. After a nice run along the Sumidagawa, we walked over to Ueno Station for breakfast. Along the way, we took a short detour down Kappabashi, a shopping street with lots of food industry shops, include Sumi's favorites: The plastic food shops. Japanese plastic food models are really quite something.

These are real. Anderson Bakery has wonderful fresh rolls.

After breakfast, we began walking down towards Akihabara, making a few stops along the way. The first, Yamashiroya, is a store full of typical Japanese toys, trinkets, figures, stuffed animals: basically Sumi's dream store. At the front of the store, they had some very cool tiny scale vintage video games. By tiny, I mean 8 inch tall, fully functional Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Galaxian, and Mappy.

Notice the 4 inch tall one on the left? Fully playable!

We both had to tell ourselves repeatedly we did NOT need them, and used all of our adult superpowers to walk out of the store without them. And only a little regret.

Our next stop was to the Toho Cinema in Okachimachi to see Detective Pikachu. Sumi really wanted to see it, and it is mostly gone from theaters out here. So we paid our ¥3100 (Wednesday is Ladies Day, so Sumi got a discount. Yeah, movies are expensive in Japan) and watched CGI Pokémon for a few hours. I have zero attachment to Pokémon, so it was pretty OK for me, but Sumi really liked it.

After the movie, we took a walk down to Akiba and looked around. It was filled with tourists even more than usual, which is odd for a Wednesday. We didn't spend a lot of time there. I picked up a used book at Book Off and the new Minna no Golf VR (silly game, but well-reviewed as a VR experience) and attempted to browse a bit, but way too many tourists. I know, I know, what are we, right? Well, there are visitors to a country and there are tourists. We decided an early exit was a good plan.

Lunch up next, we tried a new (to us) Thai restaurant, Little Bangkok, in the Okachimachi area.

Good Thai food. Not as spicy as I would like it, but good flavors.

Next up on the food excursion is our old haunt, The Wired Cafe. Each year they have new desserts. Each year it is our duty to sample them all. Sumi had a traditional parfait: Berries and chocolate. I tried a new creation: Banana and Nutella Nachos. Bananas, Nutella, berries, ice cream, waffles, and the surprise ingredient that sounded awful and tastes just amazing, potatoes. Thin sliced, slightly baked white potatoes with chocolate, bananas, and ice cream is really, really good. Who knew?

Now for a bit of sad news. In the last year not one, but two of some of our most nostalgic locations in Tokyo have shut down. First, and truly the most devastating for me, is Rasoi, the Indian restaurant in Meguro. I have said several times that it may have been my favorite restaurant in the world, and that is not hyperbole. We were shocked when we looked it up on Google Maps for their hours and found it was "Permanently Closed". To say I was looking forward to their lunch special for weeks would have been a severe understatement. The other business to shut down was the sentou (public bath house) in Asakusa that had been in existence in that location for over one hundred years. Now, we never actually used it as a bath (we have our own at the hotel), but they had a coin laundry attached where customers could wash their clothes while bathing. It is sad to see something with such a long history shut down, but I guess public baths are more or less a thing of the past in urban Japan.

Anyway, the end result was we had to do our laundry elsewhere and got to end our "eating day" with  Turkish food for dinner

My spicy chicken pita was quite good. The hummus and bread were very good. Sumi's meal was less satisfying. I think the phrase "Big Mac Sauce" was uttered when describing it. The rice pudding (not pictured) was also quite good.

We ingested more calories in the last 12 hours than we did in the previous three days. I am OK with this.