9th September, 2013

Hugh & I just had another walking around Tokyo day today. Just exploring the Tokyo city culture and memorising some travel tips. It is really humid here and I don't know how the businessmen wear their suits. Lots of ladies were also wearing jeans and long pants, which I didnt understand. I swelter in shorts! At first we wondered why restaurants gave us moist towelletes, but then you see that everyone carries a damp cloth with them everywhere to mop up sweat. I do wonder if the extreme humitidy is caused by the smog in Tokyo.

Being so hot a place I understand now why they have so many vending machines everywhere. But there is a clear lack of public seating and bins which we have alot of in Australia. There are no seats at train stations or anywhere really. If we wanted to sit it was on the ground. I usually take all our rubbish back to the hotel rooms as they do not have public bins on the street either.

We've also discovered that the best places to eat are the out of the way places that have a lot of Japanese in them. Don't go to the ones with English names or you get the same boring hamburgers, etc we get at home. Both lunch and dinner today were so good from little places we stumbled across.

Lunch we found by wandering into a basement of a building to get out of the sun. The staff seemed very confused as to why 2 Gaijin wanted to eat there. Nothing was in English and the chef pointed to the specials and simply told us what main meat it consisted of. We got the chicken, which was in some sort of sweet paste and miso soup. It cost us 680 yen (just over $7 AUD) for a really large meal.

Dinner we found when I got cranky and told my poor boyfriend to 'Just find me the closest food that isn't raw fish'. So he took me up a random staircase and there we found what is called 'Makigushi', skewers of things like chicken, beef, octopus, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc. wrapped in bacon and cooked at 950 degrees celcius. AMAZING. Each skewer cost about $1.50 to $2 AUD and we each had 4 skewers of various things.

Food is cheaper than we expected. Breakfast is costing under $10 AUD for the 2 of us alltogether for food and drinks, with lunch coming in under $15 AUD for both of us and dinner about $30 AUD for both of us.