above the crowds

i have noticed that i have quite a few new email subscribers, so i am going to open this post with a couple notes about these blog posts - the email does not have all the content of the blog posts. it seems to be a limitation of squarespace’s email service, but when i post sections with multiple photos, the email will only show one of them. the email is a cool notification that a post happened, but they wont have the full post in them unfortunately. also, because this camera takes extremely high quality pictures, i have to lower the resolution of them significantly to post them here. if you are wanting to see the highest quality versions of these pictures, they can be found on my gallery site.

today we went and walked around senso-ji temple in asakusa and checked out the skytree.

i did both of these things last year, which can be found here - asakusa 2024 / skytree 2024. i wanted to go to both of them again this year for different reasons.

for asakusa, i went last year in the evening after a sushi making class. it was pouring rain and late enough for all the businesses clustered around senso-ji to be closed. this is the most touristy area of tokyo, and if you go during the day there are tens of thousands of people everywhere. its a wildly different experience than the one i had last year. so i knew i “missed something” last time and wanted to have the more “traditional” tourist experience here. i must say though, i am glad i had the experience i did last year, because seeing this temple with almost no one around was an awesome experience that i think most people don’t ever get to see.

for the skytree, i went a second time because i wanted my mom to see it, and also because its one of the coolest experiences in tokyo and i just wanted to see it again.

asakusa on a weekend afternoon is insane. i didnt take too many photos, because there are just so many people here it is hard to do anything at all. its like a couple square miles of wall-to-wall people clustered together constantly bumping into each other. it doesnt help that i am a giant person, either. especially for japan. at one point a bunch of very young kids walked by us and one of them pointed at me and yelled “dekai!” which means huge. very funny.

we walked around here for a bit, bought some souvenirs at a few shops, and then tried to escape the crowd. i found a stall that sold big bags of dashi (soup stock) powder. they had free samples and it was 10/10 soup stock. i make my own dashi at home and have only had the powder kind a couple times. this stuff was excellent. i bought 2 giant bags of it, which makes like 40 bowls of soup.

i then had the not so brilliant idea to show my mom the famous japanese store don quijote. i for some reason thought it would be a good idea to go to one of the most crowded places in the most crowded section of tokyo on a sunday afternoon. it was absolutely insane. but i bought a few souvenirs there, including a kirby otomatone for my friends’ son.

for those unfamiliar with the otomatone, i present this video. its a silly musical instrument that i would classify as “annoying”. but before i get accused of committing a war crime on my friends’ mental health, i did clear buying an annoying toy for their son with them ahead of time.

once we finished at don quijote, we were hungry. i thought about using google maps to find somewhere to eat, but that would be boring. instead, we walked around until we saw something that looked good and just went there. we were in the most touristy area in all of tokyo, so its not like good food is hard to come by here. we ended up going to a tonkatsu place called tonkatsu oribe. for those unfamiliar, tonkatsu is a breaded, deep fried pork cutlet. japanese pork chops.

despite there being tens of thousands of people less than a block away, we were able to get seated within 5 minutes. we both ordered their regular combo, which is the tonkatsu, a small bowl of rice, a small bowl of miso soup, and some cabbage.

this was excellent. i think i mentioned this last year, but you always hear people say american portion sizes are huge, but in my experience in japan, their restaurant portion sizes are plenty big. neither of us were able to finish everything. i have never been to a restaurant here where the portion sizes felt small compared to america. i don’t know if this is just a japan thing, or if the entire notion of american portion sizes being massive is just a myth. but you get plenty of food in japan.

after we ate, we headed over to the skytree a couple hours early. we had tickets for 4:00 pm, but the skytree is attached to a pretty big mall. last year when i visited the skytree, i bought some really fancy soap from a shop at this mall, and the first thing i did once we got here is go check if that store is still there. it was, and we both bought 2 soaps each. i dont know how to describe this soap. it is an orb that feels like halfway between a stress ball and jello. it is the best feeling soap i have ever used. it turns out they sell it online at konnyaku-shabon.com. this page loads in japanese at first, but if you just wait for like 10 seconds it magically turns to english. if you are in the market for some really good soap, check this out for sure. to have the product shipped to america, they want you to use a different site called tenso.com, which is a service for buying stuff from japan.

i’ve been waiting a whole year to have another smork. i havent smorked since march 22nd, 2024.

shopping done, we went and stood in line for the skytree. this year was significantly less crowded than when i visited last year. despite having a ticket for a specific time, i still had to stand in line for like 90 minutes to get in, there were thousands of people visiting that day. but this time, we got in pretty much right at the time our ticket was for. i didnt take a ton of pictures this time, as i already took a ton last year.

this is the first day with a ton of walking of the trip, and it really took a lot out of me. by the time we left the skytree, my feet were killing me and i committed the ultimate sin of buying a cab home instead of taking the train. my backpack started the day empty and was now completely stuffed with all the stuff we bought, and kinda heavy. i didnt want to walk a mile to the train station and then stand on the train for an hour, so i paid like 30x more than the train would have cost to be able to sit down, haha. i did take one cool photo from the cab though:

anyway, thats the post!

じゃあまたね!