So last weekend me and my roommate left school and (not passing go, not collecting $200) went straight to Chinatown. The proper name of it is Chuukagai (pretty much 'Chinatown') and it's in Yokohama, which is a prefecture away but only about 35 minutes by local train.
It was really exciting to go when we did, because as it was last Friday, it was still around the time of the lunar new year, and everyone was celebrating hardcore. :D (Another of my friends had been there the night before and had seen fireworks and dragon-people parades, but we unfortunately missed that.) We wandered around all the different streets for several hours, gonig in the little souvenir shops, ogling the dim sum, etc., etc. It was pretty fun. I bought a little phone chain that has little glass chili peppers on it (they're supposed to be good luck). My roommate bought the most adorable panda hat ever.
There were people selling water chestnuts on every street corner, and handing out free samples. I probably ate an entire Y1000 bag's worth of nuts in free samples. They were delicious and tasted mealy and sort of meaty almost, which was really strange but good.
Finally we succumbed to hunger and allowed ourselves to be ushered into an all-you-can-eat dim sum restaurant by a hawker who spoke Chinese with my roommate (who's fluent). It was pretty cool because she was able to ask all the questions that neither of us could in Japanese and she knew what all the different types of food were and could make reccommendations. We ate soooooooo much , it was a little ridiculous. We had shrimp and soupy dumplings and pork and chicken and duck and rice porridge with those sketch-looking hundred-year eggs in it and a million other things, and then we had pastries and fried red-bean buns, and pudding and green tea soft-serve ice cream, and it was delicious and amazing. :D (We also had a heated discussion about pairings in Boys Over Flowers and other dramas, but that's a bit of a tangent)...Afterward we waddled out of the store and went on our merry way again, popping into various stores and searching out New Years mooncakes and other stuff. (We found one store on the main drag that was totally dedicated to K-pop merchandise, it was a little ridic.)
After that, things seemed to be winding down (most of the stores were closing, and people were moving toward the train station en masse...) so we hopped the train back to Jiyugaoka, and headed home for the night.
However, we were not done with our plans for the weekend yet.
We got home from Chuukagai around 11 pm. However, we'd already made plans to go to see the Tsukiji fish market when it opened Saturday morning (and it opens at like 5 am) so I opted to just stay up and stick out the five hours sitting in the dark while my roommate napped. We met with a big group of people from our dorm outside at 4:40 (it takes about 20 minutes to get to the station, and the first trains don't start running here till 5 am. We hopped on the first train toward the market, and upon arriving, followed our noses (seriously, you could smell it from like a block away) to the market, which was already a bustling nightmare at 5:30. There are these trolley cart/forklift things racing about everywhere and they stop for no man, it's like Frogger. :X We finally made our way into the market itself, which was truly enormous. We wandered through several aisles of (living and dead) crabs, squid, eels, flounder, salmon, and myriad other oceanic critters. Tsukiji has a terrifyingly expensive tuna auction each morning (like, millions of yen per fish) and we had hoped to see that but got there late; when the more bullheaded of us headed toward the pricey-tuna area anyway we were summarily kicked out of the market.
We skirted around the edge of the building (getting to see an impressively huge mountain of styrofoam boxes as we went around the side) and waited a few more minutes before heading back inside. (The place is the size of the UPitt campus, no one was gonna find us twice. We also ditched the folk who had got us kicked out in the first place. ;D)
There we wandered around looking for things that stuck out from the crowd of regular fish. We saw live octopi in tanks, fugu pufferfish, chimeras, stargazers, and even found one stand that was selling actual whale :O. (There are pictures of all of this, never fear.) And we were constantly dodging the ubiquitous trolley truck things, which were usually loaded down with tuna roughly the size of my little brother. (We got to see a guy cutting one up with a freaking huge sword, it was epic.)
After that, we headed back out of the frightening hustle and bustle of the market and, after buying some breakfast from a stand, hopped a train and headed back to home. It was about 9am when we arrived, and I immediately hopped right back in bed. :X
And that is the tale of my trip to Tsukiji. Pics to follow.
