Tokyo is a riot of colours. It is the neon cacophony of Pachinko parlors, the bright orange of freshly prepared salmon at the Tsukiji Fish Market, the grassy green of sponge cakes and whisked matcha tea in Ginza, the brown and gold of venerated shrines, the charming black smile of a gothic-lolita clad teenager in Harajuku and the beautiful blue of clear skies that followed us throughout our holiday in Japan. We spent about fifteen days in Tokyo and Kyoto, in October of 2007, and one year on, I still think very fondly of the city. Of the warm red bean fish cakes we ate by the side of the street, or the giggly school girls who swarmed around us during a temple visit, to practice their classroom English on us.

I never did blog much about our trip, because by the time we arrived back in Sydney, B and I taken hundreds of photos, and it seemed too overwhelming, to try sorting through the lot. Lately however, I have been inspired by Lorraine’s Tokyo posts, to sift through some of our holiday snaps, and to share a few more with anyone out there who might be interested. If you love going to people’s houses and seeing their holiday slideshows, this might be for you! 😉

When you’re rushing around, working in a kitchen surrounded by a constant assault of smells – from bubbling stocks, sizzling onions and 100 panfried steaks, to buttery pastries fluttering from the oven and 10 litres of freshly made chocolate sauce – you don’t often feel all that hungry, believe it or not. It’s usually not til I’ve left work that I realise I’m ravenously hungry. Today was no different, and I thought I would treat myself to a pretzel from my favourite one-stop-pretzel-shop, Luneburger.

If not for having to make the trek up pedestrian-unfriendly George Street to the QVB, I would probably eat Luneburger pretzels every day. When I got to the shop, my legs were wobbling from hunger, but I realised I had no money, and couldn’t find an ATM nearby. So I ducked into the nearby Woolworths and tried to find something to buy in order to get some money out from the cash register. Inconceivably, there was nothing I wanted to get, and indecision was eating away at my stomach lining. Finally I settled on a chocolate bar, got the money out, and rushed back to Luneburger. There was a generous number of glistening pretzels on display. However, they looked a bit smaller, lacked their signature sprinkling of rock salt, and were shrunken and wrinkly, rather than full and puffed, like the arms of Mr. America. Chief Baker’s day off? I wondered. Nevermind, one pretzel please! The girl behind the counter held up a pretzel and said, “These are different today. They don’t have salt on them, and there’s butter inside instead”. Stomach growling, I stared at her blankly. There’s what inside? “Butter. There’s butter inside.” She pointed patiently at the pretzel. There’s butter inside? I repeated stupidly, not quite computing that there would be no glorious, much longed for pretzel, to be had today. “Yes, butter”. Still unable to process the information, I declined to buy the sinister alien butter filled pretzel and walked away, all the while my mind was screaming, why why why with the butter?

On the train home, I unwrapped the damn chocolate bar and ate that instead.

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More pictures, as promised, from Yoyogi Park and surrounds. One of the bands playing that day had an amusing name. Unfortunately I can’t recall what it is exactly, only that it involved the word Hedgehog, which is in itself, an amusing word.

It’s been a month or more now since our return from Tokyo, and nary a picture posted. Told you this would take a long time! 🙂 The truth is I’ve been working so hard, sometimes I wonder where I even get the time to breathe.

I miss Japan every day. On the way home late from work every evening, I walk through the city and wish I was in Tokyo, where there is always some convenient food shop, restaurant or decent take-away joint, open and within reach. There are over 80 000 restaurants in Tokyo (now also the city with the most Michelin stars), compared with 3000 here in Sydney, in an area roughly a sixth the size of Sydney. I miss buying little sweets at the shops specialising in Wagashi, or sinking my teeth into a warm, freshly made red bean snapper cake bought from a street stall. I have started using matcha at work, as a tribute to the fabulous green tea confections I had during my holiday. I need to return.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from one of my favourite days in Tokyo : Sunday at Yoyogi Park and Harajuku. If you’re going to visit Harajuku, there’s no other day than Sunday to do it. Sunday is the day the cosplay kids parade themselves on the bridge near Harajuku Station. If you walk from Yoyogi Park towards Harajuku, you will be treated to the sight of not just any group of buskers with their guitars and a hat in front of them to collect spare change in, but full bands, plugged into little generators, entertaining you with a variety of Jpop, rock, and I even spied a mobile DJ station. Within Yoyogi Park itself, there are bongo drum groups, ukelele players, tap dancers, and even a guy with nunchukas. There is also a dog park consisting of two enclosures – one for big dogs, and another for little dogs. Keep an eye out for the Rockabilly Club; a group of men dressed like Elvis, in leather and greased up hair, cutting it up on the dance bitumen. On our way to Yoyogi Park, we even stumbled upon an Earth Garden Market, with stalls selling beautiful handmade wares and organic food.

If shopping, the streets of Harajuku themselves are a sight to behold. Packed knee deep as they are with mindboggling numbers of people (especially down Takeshita Dori and Cat Street), walking is soon reduced to a shuffle. But no matter, because there is so much to see anyway. The shopping fuel of choice on Takeshita Dori seems to be these large crepes rolled up and stuffed with assorted sweet things and lots of cream, while on Cat Street, we stopped for half a dozen of the most delicious takoyaki, laced with pink ginger and spring onions.

On Takeshita Dori, there are some great second hand clothes stores specialising in trendy Gothic-Lolita wear (think a hybrid of Shirley Temple, in a Stanley Kubrick/George Romero movie) or other designer threads like Vivienne Westwood and Yohji Yamamoto, if you can be bothered to do the necessary trawling. Caught up in the mood of things, I did splash out on a new Marc Jacobs jumper, but my favourite shop was actually the seven-or-eight-floored toy and trinket store, Kiddie Land (much better than the more well known Hakuhinkan Toy Park in Ginza, in my opinion).

So that was one of my favourite, exhausting, information-overloading, extremely exciting and highly missed Sundays in Tokyo.

(rest of the pictures to come..)