Ueno Park and Zoo

When you are entering the zoo, there is a big warning that the Giant Panda is actually no longer there as of last year. Not really disappointed because we didn’t know there was supposed to be a panda there. It is quite a long walk from the Ueno JR station; it is much closer from Nezu station on the Metro subway. But the up-side of taking the JR there is you get to walk through the Ueno park on the way to the zoo.

The park is famous for sakura cherry blossoms which of course were not in bloom in the middle of November. But there was a big tent set up where they were selling local produce and snacks to eat, like grilled clams and sweet potatoes.

The zoo itself is not so big, it might take maybe an hour to see the whole thing. Surprisingly 10-month old baby actually was interested in the animals. Even though he was extremely tired, he was fighting to keep his eyes open to see the animals. The monkeys were especially interesting because they run around so fast and easily caught baby’s attention.

 

Public Children’s Halls (児童館)

This is even better for kids than the nursing rooms in all the department stores. There are play areas that you can bring baby to play with toys, crawl around, play with other kids, and if they are bigger even some organized activities like painting and making crafts. And it is all free. The first one we went to was in Shibuya, about a ten minute walk from the JR station. This one is quite large; about five stories. It is open every day until about 6 PM, and the main area of interest to a ten-month old was a large, padded play area with foam obstacles to climb on, wooden push-toys (I don’t know what you call these things), and other amusements. It is really a great way to get baby out of the house to somewhere fun, to meet other parents (if only my Japanese wasn’t so crap) and kids, play with toys that you don’t own, and in general let baby go crazy in a semi-baby-proofed room.

The other jidoukan we went to was actually right across from the monthly mansion we are renting in Nishi-shinjuku. This one is also free, but you have to fill in a form first with the child’s name, address and contact information before you can go in. But once you have that filled in, you can go any time. In Toronto evidently there are similar places but they are much smaller.

There is a listing of all of them on the Tokyo Metropolitan Children’s Hall web site.

 

Tori-no-ichi festival

Unfortunately all the good festivals with the fireworks seem to happen in the summer, when it is way too hot to come to Tokyo. But there is one festival that happens in the fall at least that lets you enjoy everything about the summer festivals, except maybe for the fireworks. You get the outdoor food stalls, people lining up for some religious reasons, mysterious trinkets of great significance (in this case a bamboo rake called a 熊手) and goldfish scooping. It is called Tori-no-ichi (酉の市) and it means literally “bird market”, which is to celebrate one of the zodiac signs. It is at all the shrines around Tokyo, and especially big at Asakusa. But that was too far so we went to Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku.

The goldfish scooping game (金魚掬い) deserves some explanation because it is so awesome. You pay maybe Y300 for a plastic handle with a paper scoop. You try to scoop as many goldfish into your bowl as you can with the paper scoop before it gets too soggy from the water and breaks. You can keep the goldfish after, but what are you going to do with goldfish if you kept them, so you just give them back.

And as for the rake, I asked some people about it and it is just like any normal rake you use for raking up and collecting leaves. Except it is for raking and collecting happiness. I’m sure google would provide a better explanation but I prefer not to know any more than that.

 

University Festival Concerts

If you want to see popular music concerts in Japan, coming in fall is a great time. Many universities have something like their school festivals around this time, and they often have fairly big name (Japanese) acts playing at the schools. Some singers hit five or more schools and the tickets are pretty cheap, and because some of the schools are pretty small, you can get rather close to the band. We went to see a triple bill of Dohzi-T (童子-T), BENI and YU-A at Rissho University in Saitama. They played for only an hour and a half, and each singer got maybe four or five songs. It was inside the school auditorium, so it was not very fancy, but because there were barely 500 people there, you could be very close to the action!  There was only a single DJ and then the singers; no other live musicians or anything.

Unfortunately no pictures of the bands, but I think it is a great (and slightly different) way to experience the bands in Japan. Check the artist websites for links. To buy the tickets for this specific concert, I had to email someone at the University who was organizing the tickets, and then pay at a bank by bank transfer (振込み). If you don’t have your own bank account at a Japanese bank, you have to go to a branch of the bank used by the University to pay. E.g. the destination account was with Resona bank, so I had to go to a Resona bank branch to pay.

 

Making baby food in Japan

If you have a rice cooker and access to a Japanese grocery store, making baby food is a snap.  Standard recipe is 1.5 small cups (270 ml total) rice, small fish (shirasu), a couple of carrots, dried wakame. Just peel and grate the carrots, then chop up the wakame as small as possible (it will expand when it gets wet) and throw all in the rice cooker. The small fish are actually already cooked so you don’t have to worry about the fish not being cooked properly. Set the rice cooker to okayu (congee) mode and turn it on. For bonus protein, sometimes we put a hard boiled egg yolk or two, or some diced tofu. This made enough to fill three tupperwares full of food for baby.

 

Yokohama Chinatown and Dalian restaurant

Yokohama is famous for having a large Chinatown street. When going here by subway, don’t get off at Yokohama station, instead get off at the Chinatown street station and save yourself a very long walk…

It is definitely very clean, and there are many Chinese restaurants as well as small dumpling stores. A couple of souvenir stores, but no books, videos or anything else Chinese (which was actually the reason we came). Most restaurants offer pretty big set menus which seem kind of expensive. We were there in between lunch and dinner hours and almost every restaurant was empty, so it was hard to tell which one we should go to (since they all look pretty much identical).

We sampled some dumplings from one of the dumpling shops. Again, these look identical as well. They mostly have a huge picture of three or four chefs on the front awning brandishing various medals for their food. They also all have a fridge with some cold bubble teas in them (sweetened milk tea with tapioca balls on the bottom) that were pretty poor. It seemed like none of them made their own bubble tea; probably all shipped in in the morning from somewhere and stuck in the fridge all day. Dumplings were pretty good though.

For real food, we ended up in a new-ish looking restaurant called Dalian. A bit less expensive since we just ate dumplings and fried rice. But if you wanted, you could pay Y5000 for a single dumpling dish; reason for the price still unknown. Pretty good, and they accomodated baby as well with no issues.

 

Freshness Burger

Does Freshness Burger really need a review? Probably not if you have been here, you already know that the burger joints here are pretty different than those in North America. For example:

• Usually burgers are prepared when you order them, so they are fresh (but you have to wait)
• Like half the size, but made with twice the care
• Drinks cost as much as the burger itself, so skip the drink and just drink ice water (e.g. burger was Y350-500, drink is like Y350)

So before I leave, I will make sure to visit all the major chains (McDonald’s, Freshness, Mos, Lotteria) and see which is best. So far, Freshness Burger is ahead of McDonald’s. Burger is small, but very tasty, but the chicken burger is pretty weak. I don’t have high hopes for Lotteria but we will see.

 

Living in a monthly mansion in Tokyo

Now that you have rented a monthly mansion, here are some of the things to expect…

Kitchen

A sink with a very tiny counter on which to do all the food preparation. In Toronto I live in a rather small 2-bedroom apartment, but compared that is enormous compared to this kitchen. You have literally just maybe two feet of counter space. So you can’t have your dishes drying from your previous meal while you are working on the next one.

Appliances consist of a gas range with two burners and a tiny drawer for grilling fish, and maybe chicken wings and parts but definitely no whole chickens. It is only maybe four inches tall but fortunately any meat you will buy here in Tokyo is appropriately sized (e.g. fish, chicken pieces, that is all I have tried in there). Also we had a rice cooker and microwave.

From a baby safety standpoint, the furniture was super flimsy and just asking for baby to topple it over, so strategic placement of dining table chairs had to be used to slow him down. E.g. the microwave was perched on a shaky little cupboard, so we blocked that in with a kitchen chair.

Doing laundry is different too. No one seems to use dryers in their homes; probably the energy is too expensive, and probably it is a good idea to avoid because your clothes should last longer. So for drying, you hang everything on your balcony. Kind of time consuming, and you have to plan ahead because in winter it can take more than a day to dry your jeans and heavy stuff.

Bathroom

Now the bathroom set-up is pretty different from what I was used to. First of all, it has three sub-rooms. First is the room containing sink and washing machine. This then has two rooms off of it, one is the shower room and the other is the toilet. Is this designed so three people can use different rooms simultaneously? Maybe, but that would be pretty crowded.

The shower is set up so that you shower yourself outside of the tub (preferably sitting on a little stool or something), and then you go into the tub afterwards to warm up or whatever. But I am used to Western style stand-in-tub-and-shower, but since there is no shower curtain the whole shower room ends up wet, but I guess it doesn’t matter.

Baby-wise, no special issues except the tub is very deep so if you are bathing baby from outside the tub, it can be tough on your back.

Bedrooms

There is no real furniture to speak of, just futons and associated blankets. And of course our luggage, which we had too many pieces of to fit in the closet. Futons are nice for baby because you don’t have to worry about him falling off the bed at night (since we didn’t bring a play-yard for him to sleep in).

 

Halloween Parade in Omotesando

I don’t think that many Tokyo-ites necessarily know about this parade (at least a couple of my friends here didn’t), but on October 25 around the uber-expensive Omotesando Hills shopping mall there was a children’s Halloween parade. I believe the way the system worked was that the mall gave out 1000 tickets for children to participate. The first 1000 children who got tickets dressed up and walked around in the parade for about an hour and then got some loot from the mall.

The costumes were in general pretty low key. Many witches and princesses. I guess it’ll take some time for Halloween to become more popular and we can finally see kids dressed as something a little more edgy. We actually arrived just as the parade ended and the kids were filing out of the mall and heading home. But we did get to see them in costume, and when we went into the mall, there was still some entertainment for the kids going on. Free Glico junk food being given away, a clown doing some juggling, and kids having their photos taken in costume. So next year around this time, check the mall web site for more.

 

Things I like about Japan

Here are a few of the things that make me like Japan…

Crazy packaging contraptions. Disposable single-use drip coffee. I don’t know if it tastes better than instant, but it certainly is a lot more complicated

When the fire hydrants are dirty, it’s time to get out the toothbrush and make them sparkle!

You can buy fruits that actually taste good. These grapes were so full of flavour it was like drinking a glass of wine…

Hard to see from this picture, but with your glass of nihonshu, they give you a single, huge, ball of ice. I don’t know how they made this ice cube… If you order a highball, they will give you two, long rectangular pieces of ice. No standard ice-cube machine ice here…

The umbrella storage area has individual locks. Just so no one steals my $2 umbrella.