Asakusa Day

We walked over to one of our favorite cafe chains in Japan, St. Marc Cafe, to pick up their delicious Choco Cros (chocolate croissants).

Top was white chocolate version

After thoroughly enjoying those delights, we took our laundry over to a coin laundromat to get us through the end of our trip and to tally up all of our purchases to see what we need to declare to customs on the way back into the US.

The laundry went WAY better than in Korea - the washers had built in detergent, and the dryers were nice and big and only took 20 minutes to dry everything.

Once we finished that and dropped it off to the room, then went over to a ramen shop that had tsukemen (dipping noodles).

There was one more seat to the left of this seat - there was barely room to walk behind all those customers. True single bar ramen experience!

Shoyu ramen

Tsukemen - slightly spicy broth. This was SO DELICIOUS. 

We walked back around the corner to go to the traditional Japanese woodblock print making shop we helped make through Kickstarter. Part of our reward for the campaign was a print party where we got to make prints of our own. Dave Bull (who ran his business out of a tiny shop outside Tokyo until the wild success of the Ukiyo-e Heroes Kickstarter where he paired with an American artist to make videogame inspired prints allowed him to run a Kickstarter to purchase the Asakusa shop space) was as wonderfully personable and interesting as he appears in his YouTube videos. He walked us through the process and gave us some pointers, and we pulled 2 copies each of a print with 4 blocks. They turnd out pretty well!

The guy on the right, Kirin, was 19 and from Australia, traveling alone for a month. Super nice, and we gave him some travel ideas from our last trip to Japan. 

We walked around all the shops in Asakusa, including the main set of tourist-focused shops leading up to Sensoji Temple, mostly looking for a tanooki statue to put in front of our house.

Don’t feed tha pigeons

Tha pigeons

We stumbled onto the traditional fishing game shop that was being advertised in some of the “Find My Tokyo” videos on the trains. If you’ve never seen it, it’s kind of a carnial game where you get a little paddle looking thing that has a paper membrane on it, and your goal is to catch as many of the goldfish as you can before the paper breaks. It was really difficult!

There were several stools so more people could play 

I got two

Meghan was concentrating really hard. The sign says the record for the day was 33 fish. WTF how

We went to diner at Torikizoku, a yakitori chain that we were introduced to by Chris when we saw him in Osaka, and where we first had chicken hearts. They have upgraded since we last went!

All your ordering happens on the tablet, which helps because it was almost completely translated.

Shochu highballs - Lemon and Mandarin 

They had french fries... With ketchup and butter. Kind of weird but kinda ok?

Hearts!

Skin bits 

Pork belly (a little bit dry here)

Spicy thigh with leeks

Beef on the left, minced chicken meatballs with cheese.

We asked what kind of cheese was on the meatballs, and he went and brought back the package. It was process cheese (aka American), but said it was made with “Natural Cheese”. The waiter thought that was as funny as we did.

Camembert, Cream, and Ceddar cheese croquettes. Only ok, but oddly improved by the butter.

We walked around a little bit more before heading back to the room.