Day 20: A Day of Eating

This morning we started at the famous Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo and I was so excited for this. When we got there is reminded me so much of the market in San Francisco that I love going to so much. This one was just a lot bigger and a lot cleaner and didn't smell so bad as SF. I had a really fun day trying SO many different foods that I have never even heard of before and took many pictures of everything at the market.

I started out eating fish wrapped in bacon, then I ate a delicious strawberry filled giant mochi dessert, and then I tried sea urchin.

The sea urchin was so weird! It was pretty much liquid inside of the shell that you could scoop out and eat. It didn't taste like much, just tasted very fishy. It was kind of weird and I don't know if I would order it again, but it was really fun to watch other people eating it for the first time and watching their reactions. 

We walked around the fish market for about an hour and they had samples of foods everywhere, I was so full by the end. Then we headed to Hama-rikyu gardens to catch a boat to take us to Asakusa. The gardens were beautiful but it was SO hot today! Quite a difference from yesterday where it started pouring down rain halfway through the day. Today was definitely the hottest day we've had so far so the boat ride felt amazing. I just wish I could have jumped in the water. 

Our first stop in Asakusa was to the Kengo Kuma information center in the middle of the town. It had beautiful views from the 7th story of the Kaminarimon Gate and the rows of shops with another shrine at the end. We also saw a pagoda for the first time.

This was the first city we went to where they had rickshaws to take people where they needed to go and I'm used to them back home because people attach them to bikes and then pull people around. But here apparently they are solely human powered and the operators will run and pull you where you want to go. This was so funny to watch because is this really that much faster than walking? Unfortunately they were too expensive for us to try out but we considered it. Very entertaining though. 

We walked around a lot of the shops and saw another shrine and ate some more food here and then walked over to the Sky Tree. On our walk we found an awesome house with a giant slide that was so much fun and then we ran into a weird festival with giant plush human animals. I have no idea what it was for but we saw a lot of random characters and took our picture with them. We also met two guys that went to UC Davis along our walk which was very random but they were headed to the Sky Tree so our groups stayed together for the rest of the day. 

After all of our distractions we made it to the Sky Tree. This tower is supposed to be the tallest tower in the world at 634m tall and we paid to go up the the 350th floor. It was fairly cloudy today so we couldn't see as much as we wanted and we could just barely see Mt. Fuji. We decided not to pay to go up the the 450th floor because the visibility wasn't so great. But it was still very fun and there were nice views. After awhile this high in the air everything starts to look the same though. 

At the Sky Tree I said goodbye to my UC Davis friends and then I got separated from the rest of my group so it was my first time taking the train system back by myself, I was pretty proud. Made it home, got some dinner and then back at the house we finally experienced our first Japan earthquake! I have been hoping for this because I didn't want to leave Japan without feeling one. There was an 8.5 quake a little ways from us so we felt about a 5.2 aftershock. Our house swayed a lot and it was so long! I didn't count the seconds but it just kept going and I couldn't even tell when it finally ended. It was a great way to end our last night in Roppongi.