A quiet week in Tokyo

The last week or so has been extremely busy, with a sumo tournament, some Iaido, a trip to Kyoto as well as my brother and Katja visiting (not to mention attending intensive Japanese courses). Not that I'm complaining or anything.... So, since the weather was pretty bad to boot, and we had a trip to Hong Kong to look forward to, we had a rather quiet week for a change. We did get up to a few things, though.

One place we really enjoyed visiting last year was Mitaka, a small town located at the Western outskirts of Tokyo, famous due to the fact that the Ghibli museum is located there (we visited it last year). So we decided to visit it on a not-so-rainy Wednesday, before our Japanese course. The idea was to try to relocate a nice area near the train station, where we had checked out quite a few nice, quirky shops. However, we struggled a bit to find the place. We got diverted (my fault!) into visiting a couple of modestly interesting temples (let's say they didn't overly impress as after a weekend in Kyoto...).

We then walked through the rather nice Inokashira park (where the Ghibli museum is located), after which we realized it was time for lunch. We found a rather nice restaurant specializing in beef tongue - very tasty indeed! That's the cool thing about Japan, and Tokyo in particular, there are just so many restaurants to discover, a lot of them specializing in very specific types of dishes. A pity we're not good enough at reading Japanese to identify just what each restaurant specializes in!

Thursday night, we decided to head into Asakusa for a nice evening walk, and a bit of shopping. Asakusa is one of my favorite parts of Tokyo, as it's one of the areas of Tokyo that still has a bit of that "Shitamachi" atmosphere. Shitamachi is a term used to describe the area roughly speaking east of the imperial palace - it's where the lower social classes used to live (the rich folks lived in the hillier Yamanote, west of the imperial palace).

As Asakusa has mostly been spared of most modern developments, the place s very different indeed from ultramodern parts of Tokyo like Shibuya, Shinjuku & Roppongi. Anyway, we enjoyed a rather nice evening walk along the Sumida river. We also visited the Asakusa tourist information center (Asakusa caters to a lot of tourists since there's also quite a lot of cheap accomodation there). It's a pretty cool place actually, with  some exhibitions about Asakusa, and best of all, a panoramic terrace from where there are quite nice views over Asakusa and the Sensoji temple (a shame I didn't bring my camera - my smartphone is not particularly good for low-light photography).

On Friday night, we decided  to head for dinner with  our culinary guide Matsuoka-san. As always, we had a fantastic tim. He took us to another place that would basically be almost impossible to find by just strolling around randomly (the place is discretely hidden on the second floor of a building near the train station). The food was of course great, as always. They had "erotic sake" on the menu, which we just had to try (there was some French writing on the bottle - not sure whether that's what made it "erotic"?). We also tried some sparkling sake, which I didn't even know existed.