We decided to follow our planned itenary and went to Ginza before noon. Did a bit of a walkabout (some of the streets were blocked from traffic as it is pedestrian day on a Sunday), taking a few pictures and finally ending up at the Sony building. Going through the showrooms, the most interesting part was actually the headphones. Sony has made some rather large looking (a bit like having a tire on your ear, but really soft) headphones with a very nice bass sound. I was thinking about maybe having a pair of those to listen to 'my' music without disturbing the surroundings.
We had started out pretty late so we decided to find our planned lunch place. The strange thing about coming to Ginza was how familiar it felt, I had been there maybe twice a couple of years ago, but I recognized the station, the surroundings and how to get to the Sony building (close, only took one street wrong) and I had a pretty good feel where the Kabuki-za theater is, which we are going to visit later on. But back to today.
My food loving companion had found this Gompachi chain of restaurants, she wanted to try out, and one of them was in Ginza. Without much ado we found it, with the help of a little pre-work in Google Street view again. First reaction, "There is another outlet close by, is there not?", as the place looked like a dump and there was this old guy, seriously down on his luck, who was sorta doing some maintenance on the rather wild growing shrubs and trees around the restaurant. On our first try, we totally missed to find the entrance, suspicion was that it was somewhere beneath the green stuff, and a look into the windows showed a totally empty restaurant. My comment, "Are you really sure you wanna go there?".
Fortunately my companion had found out that there was another restaurant from the chain close by, so after walking around in some slightly depressing looking back alleys for a while (this was obviously the slum, in Ginza this means high-end slum though), we gave up, and feeling hungry for the first time after arriving, I suggested we go back. We could give it a try, how bad can it be, we could just choose some well-cooked items, right.
Surprisingly, coming back along the side of the building beside the restaurant, we realized that a group of restaurants had a shared entrance and that there was a dress code (seemed a bit radical for a potential dump-looking place). But how were we surprised, as it turned out to be a really nice inside, and when we came into the restaurant it became obvious that this was a style they had chosen intentionally, the slightly old worn down look. And it is always fun to be yelled a greeting by all the employees in the restaurant. The food turned out to be really nice, my Teriyaki Chicken with rice and cold soba was delicious and I enjoyed the dinner very much especially the juicy char grilled chicken. The clientel was primarily older Japanese women with a few young and middle aged couples as well, and tourists (which I teased my companion about, choosing a touristy eating place). Especially a large European family caught my eye as all the teenage and young women in this family obviously had had a bad reaction to Japanese food as they all seemed to have gained several kilos after they took on their small dresses this morning. I was slightly worried that the small dresses might explode of their bodies, and as all the young women of the family seemed to have this condition it was probably geneticilly instead of just bad taste. I am sorry but sometimes rudeness is needed to save the world of having to watch this.
The toilets were fortunatelly only partly kept in the same old style, although it took me few seconds pressing all kinds of stuff, before realing the little round metal button on the floor was the flush button, and I nearly tore out the waterpipe when I turned the water off after washing my hands. Kind of nice keeping the worn down look in the toilets as well.
On our way back to the station we visited an Okinawa grocery shop on the way (with all things Okinawan), greeted by some slightly painfull ambient music (a woman with a very repetive screeching voice blarred out with some traditional sounding Japanese music accompining) on entry. Strangely enough, after about 20 seconds I started looking for the CD section as it was kind of interesting in sort of a masochistic way, I did not find it though. We ended up buying some cream cola (not especially nice, but drinkable), a dring for my companion (I forget what) and a small cake which challenged my recovering stomach more than I liked, so I only had one bite. Maybe will return to the shop though, they had some nice stuff, especially a lot of nice Sake.
Then we moved on to Akihabara. We did a quick check of the streets, but as it was Sunday afternoon and really filled with people, we quickly decided to go for Yodobashi as my companion wanted to look at a camera. I did a bit of a big walkabout on the first floor as I was confusing this outlet for the Osaka one, but after I got my bearings it was back to bussiness. We found the Ricoh CX2 (we noticed afterward that it looked like this camera was everywhere used for comparison on every other camera) and our interest was obviously so intense that it caught the eye of a sales person (quite impressive with the amount of people that were there). He did a very good job with his limited English of selling the camera and my companion ended up with an extra battery (wise choice) and a leather casing (initially a bad choice as it was expensive, but after fondling it a bit, I must say it really is very nice soft leather and well worth its price). Getting tired now we decided to take a break, go back to the hotel and charge our batteries (and the cameras).
Arriving around 8 in the evening in Shibuya, a mass of, primarily very young people seemed to fill up the streets everywhere. The place was buzzling with life. Without any detour we quickly managed to find the chosen restaurant for the evening, Mo Mo Paradise, again part of a chain of restaurants. This chain specializing in all you can eat (for 90 minutes) Shabu Shabu and Sukiyaki among other things. Deciding on Shabu Shabu (I like Sukiyaki a lot, but raw egg seemed like a less prudent choice considering the state of my stomach, which was recovering, but far from any kind of robustness yet). Havind experienced a rather boring tasting Shabu Shabu in a restaurant in Copenhagen, this was quite the opposite, although the Sesame sauce was better in Copenhagen, the meat in Shibuya was delicious and this together with an already very nice lunch turned out to be a really good food day. As an added bonus, I got a steam facial during the dinner as well, and had occasionally problems seeing through my steamed up glasses. Both lunch and dinner places are worthwhile to revisit some time in the future.
After some good food all day, my stomach has decided to calm down and appreciate the food, not fully working but less annoying.
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