Author: Allison

If you’re looking for the Tour de France post, check it out on my other food blog, Fridgg! 😀

On our second to last day in Japan, we visited the Ghibli Museum. You know the Japanese animated films like Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service…? Well, Ghibli is the man who did all the art for those movies, and this museum is dedicated to him and his art.

You’re not allowed to take photos inside of the museum, but we did manage to sneak one picture of the robot statue on the roof…

That day was a rainy day, and a day mostly filled with shopping for souvenirs, gifts, and other goodies to bring home.

However, we still had one major thing left that we just had to do before we left Japan. So we trekked through the freezing, pouring rain, to go to…

Bassanova!!!

For those of you who don’t know, Bassanova is the ramen restaurant where Keizo of Go Ramen fame works.

Obviously, we had to try his ramen.

Lucky for us, Keizo was more than happy to help us order the ramen… since the ticket machine didn’t have any pictures. 😮

There are two kinds of ramen Bassanova is known for.

Their official special is the tonkotsu ramen.

But the one Keizo has made famous is their green curry ramen.

Of course, we had to try a bowl of each. 😀

The green curry ramen… AMAZING.

Oh, and the tonkotsu was pretty good too. 😀

But back to that green curry ramen… creamy, spicy… almost too spicy, but even as my entire mouth was burning I couldn’t stop eating because it was so freaking good… (okay, so I don’t have a high spice tolerance. Shush.)

My only regret was that we didn’t visit Bassanova earlier in the trip, so we could come back and eat that green curry ramen again!

One of these days I may have to kidnap Keizo and make him teach me how to make it. It’s that good. 😉

I swear, I’ve been craving another bowl of that ramen ever since we left Bassanova… thanks a lot, Keizo. 😀

The next morning was our last day in Japan! So sad. We wanted to stay longer.

Since it was our last morning, we wanted to revisit a restaurant we loved.

Unfortunately, Bassanova doesn’t open until late – after we had to be at the airport – so we couldn’t go back there.

Instead, CoCo Curry again!

Perfect. 😀

After our breakfast of curry, we noticed we were pretty close to the Tokyo Tower. So we headed off in that direction for some last-minute sightseeing.

But instead of at the Tokyo Tower, we found ourself in the middle of the gorgeous Zojoji Buddhist Temple!

We weren’t complaining. 😀

Photo courtesy of Francis Castillo

Close to the Tokyo Tower… but not quite there. 😉

It was there that we realized… during the entire Japan trip, we hadn’t gotten a single picture of our entire group!

Of course, we had to fix that.

After that, it was off to the airport.

Goodbye, Japan! Hope we can come back soon! 😀

This is the last post in the Japan series… and the last post you can comment on to enter to win a bamboo rolling mat and a package of nori from Japan! The contest closes 11:59PM PST Wednesday – any comments on any Japan post after that will not be counted. Winners will be contacted by email, and announced on Friday soon! 😀

P.S. Did you know you can also hang out with me on the Sushi Day page on Facebook?

P.P.S. Speaking of hanging out, you’re following me on Twitter, right? Feel free to say hi, ask questions, poke fun at me… I always love getting to know my readers better. 😀

Our sixth day in Japan started early, so we ate breakfast on the train… grilled mochi filled with adzuki beans that we had purchased the night before. Yum.

So where were we off to so early?

It was a two hour train ride, but this time we weren’t going to Kyoto…

We went to Nagano!

Yep, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. 😀

We didn’t stay long though. We had just a few moments to step outside the Nagano train station and look outside, before we were back on a train again.

This time a much, much smaller express local train.

Which had an awesome view out the back.

So where we going?

Past small village streets, where the clanging of the train crossing bell could be heard before we got to every road.

Over a bridge…

… around a few curves…

… to grandmother’s house we go?

No, wait, that’s not right… both my grandmothers live in the US.

And I’m pretty sure (though not 100% certain) that the Japanese side of my family isn’t from Nagano.

Here we are! But where is here?

Look! A ninja! I knew we’d see one in Japan!

Oh wait.

That’s me.

Did I mention it’s really freaking cold where we were going? REALLY. FREAKING. COLD!

In fact, it was snowing. Can you see it? 🙂

Yeah, so… we’re still not there. We’re on a bus!

Now we’re there!

Well, almost.

We’re off the bus, anyways… and it’s snowing harder.

Now we walk. Uphill. In the gentle snowfall.

The snow might not seem all that significant, especially to those of you who live in or frequent snowy areas… but Son had never, ever been in snow before.

I had always promised him that someday, I would take him to see snow. And finally, he got to. 😀

Here’s where we were headed!

At least, this is the entrance.

More hiking before we’re actually there though…

Can you tell where we were going yet?

The higher up the mountain we got, the more the snow stuck.

It was a beautiful hike, but that’s not why we were there…

(And the point also wasn’t to get a bunch of silly pictures of me freezing my tush off… *stern look at Son*)

Only halfway there… but a nice little refuge if it’s snowing or raining too hard!

Almost there…

LOOK! A MONKEY!

We’re here! For real! Finally!

I’m sure you’re wondering by now… where exactly is “here”?

This is the Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park in Nagano, Japan.

A large family of snow monkeys comes down from the surrounding mountains to hang out here during the day, and then go back up to their home in the mountains at night.

Although us visitors are not allowed to feed the monkeys, workers here will give the monkeys a few apples as treats every day. They don’t mean to provide the monkeys with their full diet, but instead give them incentive to keep coming down to the snow monkey park in the valley every day.

The monkeys enjoy frequenting the hot springs – not surprising, because it gets really cold there! (And we were there in spring… imagine how cold it would be in the dead of winter!)

There are no cages, nor even any barriers separating you from the monkeys… as you can see, you could reach out and touch one as they run right past one! (Not that I recommend that. The monkeys tend to not care one bit about the humans taking pictures of them, but the Snow Monkey Park says not to touch or feed the monkeys, and with good reason! You wouldn’t want a monkey to turn on you, or not return to the park because humans spooked/drove them off.)

You could spend hours watching the monkeys play and eat and all that monkeys do.

We did.

You can too! There’s supposedly a live webcam that lets you watch the monkeys all the time. (I say supposedly, because I see it frozen on a picture from earlier today, but haven’t seen any updates to it since then.)

We probably would have stayed out there longer, if we hadn’t needed to catch the bus back to the train station.

If we did this again, we probably would make it a two-day trip, and stay at one of the little hotels on the mountain, so we could spend more time with the monkeys.

And definitely would go in either winter or summer, when the colors are more vibrant and everything’s not just brown.

After a while of watching them, you started to learn each monkey’s distinct personality.

The above picture is one I took on Son’s iPhone, of him taking the below picture. See how close they could get? One even ran up and grabbed onto Son’s leg as it was playing with another monkey!

We were up there for two hours (not including the half-hour walk up to the monkey park) before I got too cold… I went and hung out in the little hut that doubles as a souvenir shop, that has a tiny heater so I could thaw out my fingers and legs.

While I warmed up, Son went back out again, for another hour!

He loved taking pictures of all the different monkeys…

… can you blame him?

Back down the mountain we went…

… and caught the little local train back to Nagano

Looks like we were just in time to share the train with masses of uniformed local school children, who all took the train home after they were finished with their school day.

By the time we got back to Nagano, we were starving. So of course, we went in search of good food.

Every department store in Japan has a big food area in the basement. They’re worth checking out!

We stopped by a food stall that had steamed pork belly buns… ohmygod SO good.

Then we got an egg tart…

… and a banana-chocolate ice cream-filled waffle.

After taking an elevator up to the top floor to see if there was any other good food up there (there were restaurants, but nothing that really appealed to us.) we decided to walk to the Zenkouji Temple.

On our way there, we passed a Mos Burger. We had been wanting to try this Japanese burger chain, so we stopped in and shared a burger. Very good… much lighter and tastier than most burgers you can find here in the US!

Then we kept walking.

Until we found a little shop with free wifi… and discovered that the Temple had already closed a couple of hours ago.

Oops. Good thing we checked!

Back to the train station we went, to go reserve our ticket (free with the JR pass) to take the Shinkensen back to Tokyo.

We had some time before the train left, so we went off to find some more food.

Because Son really wanted to try some soba while we were in Nagano (it’s the specialty there).

What? We’re food bloggers. We never really stop eating. 😉

Son loved the soba…

I loved the tempura…

… and we had just enough time after our meal to stop and watch this man paint huge pictures with water, before we had to dart to the platform to catch our train.

What a long day! Such a tiring day, in fact, that Son and I fell asleep on the way back to Tokyo, my head on his shoulder, his head resting on mine.

It’s a good thing Tokyo was the last stop… the conductors had to come wake us up after all the other passengers had left!

***

Don’t forget, just a couple of Japan posts left! Leave a comment on any of my posts about Japan, and you’ll be entered to win one of two bamboo rolling mats and packages of nori from the Tsukiji Fish Market. One comment per post, please!

Our fifth day in Japan was one of the longest, and also by far one of my absolute favorite days there. You’ll see why in a moment… 😀

We got up early, and headed out to the Tsukiji Fish Market.

Um.

Sorta…

Wait a minute…

So we, being the silly confused tourists that we were… got lost. Well, not entirely. We were in the right general area, but we ended up going to the “Shops and Restaurants” section of the market… not to the actual fish market itself.

I actually think we were there too late to see anything very interesting at the fish market, and the tuna auctions were closed to the public anyways. *sigh* Next time, maybe?

So instead, we went to get sushi for lunch.

I was a very, very bad girl.

Very.

Very.

Bad.

But… to be fair, I almost never, ever eat tuna. Ever. And I figure this is the kind of thing that I should try once, since I was at the fish market in Japan!, but obviously won’t be doing on a regular basis. Even if I go back to Japan.

You forgive me, right?

After lunch, we explored the shops a little more.

We bought lots of nori and a few rolling mats (that I’m giving away to you!), some itsy bitsy fried crab cracker things, and…

… apple buns. Yum. This, more than anything, shows the value of giving out free samples. We wouldn’t have bought any, if not for the samples the vendor gave us. 😉

After the fish market, the guys insisted on going to the Pokemon Center, which they had seen a poster for at the train station. It turned out to be just a store, I think, but… boys will be boys, right? 😉

We still had a bit of time to burn, and Son wanted to see the ocean, so we walked over to the nearby Hamarikyu Gardens.

And promptly lost the rest of our group. Again.

Failing to locate anyone else we had arrived with, Son and I went to the nearest train station (which ended up being a different one than the one we had arrived at), and headed back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel, our group reunited, and then… we got to meet up with Keizo!

Who is Keizo, you ask? Only the ramen man… he started writing about ramen on his blog, Go Ramen, when he lived here in Los Angeles, and then last year, he uprooted his entire life to go live in Japan and work at a ramen shop. The man took the leap and is living his dream… which I think is beyond awesome.

Plus, he’s just as cool in person (if not cooler!) as he is online (I first met him on twitter, when he started following me. 😀 )

Of course, if you’re meeting the ramen man, obviously you have to go eat ramen, right? Luckily for us, Keizo knows all about the ramen scene in Tokyo (and most of Japan!), so he took us somewhere we would have never discovered on our own – the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum!

A ramen museum? Well, what’s so special about that? If you’re not much of a museum person, like me, it doesn’t sound all that exciting.

But this isn’t your average museum.

Nope… they have ramen you can eat. And not just one place… there are 8? 10? different mini ramen shops inside of the museum! Excited yet? You bet I was.

Of course, first we had to decide which ones we wanted to try…

Even better, each little ramen place has mini bowls of ramen – so you can try several different bowls in one visit.

It just gets better and better.

First one we tried was a shoyu ramen. The restaurants switch out from time to time, and since this shoyu ramen place was fairly new to the museum, Keizo wanted to check it out. So Son and I decided to tag along… yum!

We met back up with the rest of our little group, and went to a tonkotsu ramen shop in the back right corner of the bottom floor (the restaurant section of the ramen museum is two stories high in the basement of the building, and then on the main floor there is an actual museum and a gift shop).

*waves* Hi, Keizo! ^_^

There were two main types of tonkotsu ramen, so Son and I got a bowl of each type.

The last shop we went to was a spicy miso ramen. Too spicy for me, but that’s okay – by then I was stuffed, and only had a bite of Son’s ramen. This was Keizo’s favorite – he was telling us how he finds himself craving this ramen.

Afterwards, Keizo took us to a nearby mall, where we hung out for a little while in the basement – where all the food shops are! And of course, we did a little shopping… yes, we took full advantage of the fact that Keizo can read and speak Japanese fluently. 😉 Remember what I said about him being awesome? Yep! He was SO helpful, and more than happy to help us all out. Domo arigato gozaimasu, Keizo! 🙂

Don’t forget… just a few more Japan posts left! If you leave a comment on any of my posts about my Japan trip, you’ll be automatically entered to win a rolling mat and nori from Japan! Hey, I might even thrown in a Sushi Day shirt, just for the fun of it! 😀

On our fourth day in Japan, we started the day by walking to the other side of Shinagawa station to try Yoshinoya for breakfast.

The beef bowl itself was exactly the same as what you’d get at any Yoshinoya here in the USA.

But the service… very different. Very Japanese. 😀

Then we went on our way, back through Shinagawa station to catch the train to our first destination of the day…

… and nearly got trampled in the process. Holy cow. The morning rush hour stampede is ridiculous… and almost dangerous!

The guys decided they wanted to go to Ginza… because they wanted to visit an Apple store. *sigh* A waste of time, if you ask me… it wasn’t much different than any Apple store you’d find here.

So those of us who weren’t shopping decided to leave, and see what there was to see in the area. We were supposed to go to the Tokyo Imperial Palace later that day, so we found a nearby park to hang out at for a little while.

On the way there, suddenly traffic was stopped, there were cops all over the place… and a fancy horse-drawn procession came down the boulevard. It seemed to be some sort of foreign dignitary, perhaps?

We found the park, which had a beautiful (manmade?) cliff overlooking a little lake, complete with cranes, turtles, and several cats who appeared to live there (not strays, though… they appeared to be well-fed, happy, taken-care-of cats, that belonged to the park.)

We had a couple of meat buns for lunch in the park, then, thanks to some misunderstandings and confusion, ended up sprinting the mile or so to the Tokyo Imperial Palace.

Which was… meh… a waste of time, especially if you’re like me and really not much of a history buff. Not much to see there, and it was a very short tour.

After the tour, we headed back to our hotel… where I crashed. Meanwhile, the guys went out to get some dinner at CoCo Curry… and my wonderful boyfriend brought back a plate for me.

Wait… CoCo Curry… does that sound familiar?

It should. 😀

And yes, it was just as good (better, even?) than the first time we had it. Why is there not one of these in Los Angeles? I could eat it every day! 😉

Don’t forget, just a few more posts to enter the contest to win a package of nori and a sushi rolling mat from Japan! Just leave a comment on any of my posts about my Japan trip (I’ll count one comment per person per post), and I’ll pick two winners at the end.

Photo courtesy of David Calhoun

I’ve never been much of a traveler. (Though you wouldn’t know it from my itinerary for this year.) Up until a couple of years ago, I had only been to a few states aside from California, and never been off the mainland. And certainly never to another country.

However, I’ve always wanted to go to Japan. I just never thought I’d get the opportunity to – certainly not for a while, at least. But earlier this year the opportunity presented itself: some of Son’s friends decided they wanted to go on a photo tour of Japan. I didn’t think they were serious, but it wasn’t long before we had the trip booked for just a couple of months in the future.

Excited? You bet I was!

The next two months couldn’t pass quickly enough… the ten hour flight… yeah, I could have done without that. And then trying to figure out our JR Passes (a must-have if you’re visiting Japan – buy them outside of the country, because they can’t be bought in Japan), then the hour-long train ride to get to our hotel… we crashed that first night. But I was excited… so excited about the food! Of course. I’m food blogger, what else would you expect? So you must be wondering, what was our first meal?

McDonalds. *facepalm* Yeah… it wasn’t my idea.

After a quick breakfast, we caught a train to our first destination: Ueno Park.

Finally, some Japanese food! There was a takoyaki (octopus balls! no, not those kinds of balls… they’re little fried balls made of octopus bits) stand right at the entrance of the park… so of course we had to get some.

That’s some good stuff right there.

Street food? Oh yes. That’s where it’s at, people.

Then we finally got into the park, and were surrounded by cherry blossoms galore! ‘Twas glorious.

Inside Ueno park, there’s a little temple (and a zoo we didn’t go to, and a museum that we’ll talk about later).

Photo courtesy of David Calhoun

Photo courtesy of David Calhoun

After our little stroll through the temple, off to Tokyo National Museum (which was just across the plaza in the middle of the park) we went!

Lots of cool stuff there.

Especially the swords.

Ooooh, the swords.

Behind the museum was a pretty little garden, complete with a few gorgeous tea houses and a little lake (filled with gigantic crows!)

Photo courtesy of David Calhoun

And in the vending machines at the museum, we found my new favorite drink – Nectar. Like a peach in liquid form… so good. So refreshing.

Anyone know if Nectar is available in the US? I haven’t looked yet, but I’m hoping they’ll have it at some of our local Japanese supermarkets…

(And yes, if you’ve ever heard that vending machines are everywhere in Japan, it’s true!)

After the museum, we headed to Akihabara…

… land of electronics and cosplayers.

For lunch we went to a food truck (thought I was back in LA for a moment there) that was serving pita-type sandwiches filled with cabbage and a meat that was sliced off a big rotating spit. Delicious, but *sigh* not Japanese! And not my idea. *grumble*

Photo courtesy of Francis Castillo

A little while later we went to a multi-story restaurant that was serving curry and some other dishes… it was just alright. But it was our first encounter with using vending machines to order our food (you pay at the vending machine, then give the ticket you receive to the people inside the restaurant).

Heh, talk about confused American tourists. 😉

We stopped by a several-story arcade where there were all sorts of old-school arcade games…

… and took a break for a quick game of air hockey. 😀

And then… Mister Donut!!! I first heard of it on Todd and Diane’s blog, so we had to stop by and try it. We tried the chocolate-coated custard-filled donut, and the adzuki bean-filled donut rolled in sugar… both very, very good. There’s something about donuts (and pastries in general) in Japan… although they appear to be fried just like those here in the US, they are SO much lighter. Dangerous, really, because it tricks you into thinking you can eat that much more. 😉

On our way out of Akihabara, we saw a little shop that was serving onigiri, so we had to stop there. Son and I shared a chicken-filled one (which somehow we entirely failed to get any pictures of)… oh man, after a day of very little Japanese food, that really hit the spot.

What a day! After months of mostly sitting around (I’m a programmer, so almost all of my time is spent in front of the computer), a day full of walking was exhausting. We went back to the hotel and crashed for a couple of hours… then ventured out in search of dinner. We wanted something Japanese… which was harder to find than you’d have thought! We found McDonald’s, French places, Italian restaurants, even an Irish pub… after walking around for an hour, we finally found a little ramen shop just around the corner from our hotel.

Son and I shared a bowl of ramen and an order of gyoza.

It was perfect. Just perfect.

Okay, so I know you’re all wondering… what was all this I said about a contest? Well, as you’ll see in a future post, we stopped by the fish market on one of our days there, and found a cute little store selling cooking-ware, and a shop that was all about seaweed. So, this being a sushi blog, I decided to get a package of nori and a rolling mat – from Japan – to give away to you. (I got two of each, so there will be two winners).

So how do you enter? Just leave a comment on any of my daily posts about my Japan trip before Wednesday, May 12. Only one comment per person per post will be counted, so you can get up to 8 entries. I’ll announce the winners by the end of that week!