Japan (Day 4) – Shibuya & Tokyo Tower

It was only day 4 in Japan. And already, I was craving for pasta!

At noon, we were in an area someplace near Shibuya when an unusual rocket-shaped glass building caught our attention. We spotted the little Italy flag from afar through the glass and realised it was an Italian restaurant! What luck!

The design of the restaurant was really quaint. They had English words on the menu too. Phew! Finding places to dine in Japan can get quite daunting for someone that doesn’t know Japanese. Before entering a place, I had to make sure there were English words on the menu or pictures of the food somewhere.

An israeli friend of mine faced the same problem when he went to China. He would simply walk right into the kitchen of the restaurant, point to some ingredients and get the chef to cook it. Haha!

My favourite choice of pasta — seafood marinara! There was a whole lot of seafood but I wasn’t a fan of the overall salty taste.

After lunch, we spotted this cute coconut tree structure near the Italian restaurant. I found it to be really apt during the hot Japan summer!

Not satisfied with the almost fruitless shopping trip from the previous day, we went back to the Shibuya shopping district again.

(I love this shot above. The sky was a gorgeous shade. I didn’t even have to photoshop the image!)

They have some rather interesting naming conventions for buildings. The one above is parco part-2. There’s parco part-1 and parco part-3 nearby. Similarly for the trendy Shibuya 109 building I blogged about in yesterday’s post, there’s also 109-2 in the same vicinity.

Spotted at Shibuya: this giant g-shock was an actual functioning clock!

Pretty soon, we had to duck into a cute dessert café for some cool relief! Summer in Japan is really no joke. During my trip, there was news that some 15 Japanese died due to the heat. It was really bad.

The temperature skyrocketed to 40 degrees Celsius at times, but most afternoons it lingered between 36 and 38. It made Singapore seem really cool in comparison. I could buy 6 or 7 bottled drinks from vending machines throughout the day and find myself not having to pee once. Yes, it was THAT hot!

You know what goes great with the hot weather?

Ice cream! This strawberry ice cream wrapped in rice cake sheet was too pretty to resist! Notice how it was pink and served on a baby blue coloured plate? The colours complement each other perfectly, another sign that the Japanese really pay a whole lot of attention to the way things are presented.

Too pretty! It was yummy too! The rice cake sheet was a really nice touch to this sweet dessert. When it comes to desserts, Hong Kong is probably the only other place that can rival with Japan.

The menu also had calorie information printed on it. For the health-conscious Japanese, this was pretty common.

You know what else goes great with the hot weather? Cold beer!

According to Beni, T.G.I. Friday’s have some awesome and really smooth draft beers. (The dude is a beer addict fanatic who can down 15 pints at one go. So he really knows what he’s talking about!) I recalled seeing a T.G.I. Friday’s in Shibuya the previous day so we spent the next hour walking up and down bustling Shibuya to hunt it down! All this for the sake of beer! Would you believe that?

None of the Japanese we asked had a clue where T.G.I. Friday’s was. Finally, this black dude gave us the right directions.

Whoa, seeing that big and bright “Friday’s” signboard sure was a sight for sore eyes!

Our hard-earned prize! Beni was right; the beer was really smooth, so smooth that I drank it as though it was lemon tea! I had never finished a beer so quickly before.

Chicken goes well with beer too. I must, must, must have chicken everyday or else it would feel like something is missing! This particular grilled chicken at Friday’s was awesome. The black sauce, it was barbeque I think, was so thick, my throat became a little sore. But I ate it all anyway because it was that good!

Boy, how I wish we had T.G.I. Friday’s in Singapore!

Photo by Beni

Photo by Beni

Both photos of Shibuya above were taken by Beni. Dude must have been feeling blue. He told me that the language barrier makes it difficult to forge any connection with people other than the most superficial. For a modern city with such a high influx of foreigners, the people here know much less English than what I had prepared myself for.

Spotted this cool LED animation on an advertisement board. I think it’s for a club or something.

After Shibuya, we made our way to the magnificent Tokyo tower!

Photo by Beni

So there we were, standing at one of the most beautiful and significant landmarks of Japan. And neither of us had a decent camera! I had my LG Shine and a compact digital camera that can hardly capture night shots. Beni had only his Sony ericsson mobile phone.

And whaddya know? The best (of the worst) shot was captured on Beni’s mobile phone!

Photo by Beni

Tokyo tower is the tallest man-made structure in Japan with a design based on the eiffel tower. I had always wanted to see the eiffel tower, but since that ain’t happening anytime soon, this was a really nice consolation. I was surprised to find out that at 333 meters, Tokyo tower is actually 13 metres taller than the eiffel tower!

The steel tower is painted in bright orange and white. At night, it lights up in colours that may vary according to the occasion. During summer, it is lit in white. For the matrix reloaded movie premiere for example, the tower was lit in neon green!

There were a couple of observatories at the tower where we could go up to enjoy the view (for a fee, of course). At night, we got a nice panoramic view of Tokyo from the main observatory. The famed Rainbow Bridge and giant ferris wheel could be seen in the distance! (we would be heading there within the next couple of nights. Stay tuned!)

The experience was a memorable one and it reminded me of the time I went up to the 84th level of the Baiyoke Sky Hotel in Bangkok. That was the first time I ever travelled solo. Enjoying a panoramic view of a city should always be part of the itinerary when travelling to some place new.

We remained at Tokyo tower until it closed. Then, we had dinner-cum-supper at a sushi restaurant. My first sushi in Japan!

Salad and chawanmushi (steamed egg custard).

Many restaurants open ’til late in Japan. By the time we left, it was already past midnight! We missed the train and had to take a cab instead. It ended up being a really expensive cab ride, and not just due to the cab fare alone.

During the day’s shopping trip in Shibuya, I had bought 4 guys’ shirts (for friends) and 2 cute bras (for myself). It ended up being another fruitless shopping trip anyway because I left it all behind in the cab! It was worth a few hundred (singapore) bucks!

Surprisingly, I found myself feeling sore not due to the large amount spent on the stuff I lost. It was more of the fact that all my efforts in finding gifts for my friends had totally gone down the drain!

Having formed a really good impression of the Japanese, I harbored high hopes that the cab driver might return my stuff at my hotel (that’s where he dropped me off). Well, he didn’t. The hotel receptionists helped made calls to the various cab companies but nothing came up. Beni joked that if it weren’t for the bras, the driver would probably have returned all my stuff!

Anyway right now I’m already long over the incident, so let’s move on!

Speaking of cabs, do you know that the cab fare in Tokyo starts from ¥660? That’s around 8 to 9 Singapore dollars! For all the cab rides I took, the cab fare always ranged from 30 to 40 bucks. I ended up using the subway most of the time.

Stay tuned for day 5!