Food Tokyo! Day 3 ~ Asakusa, Akihabara

Day 3 started with heading to 7-11 for breakfast~

In comparison to 7-11 here… we are seriously lacking the amount of fresh/packed food that Japan provides. Despite the lack of space, 7-11s here pack a real variety of food from sandwiches, bento sets, pastries, desserts (*w*!) and even warm ‘pau’ and hotpot like food (which I learned later is left to soak in that warm broth for almost the whole day!). Lots of stuff to choose from honestly…

And… they have a wide range of alcohol lol. So boyfie had a different can of beer every night.

Moving on…

My brunch that day consisted of a chicken cutlet sandwich and a bottle of milk tea. The chicken cutlet was a tad salty for my taste because they used a thick soy sauce as dressing. But the bread had all the brown sides removed. Woot! The milk tea… was quite watered down. It was like drinking those bubble milk teas where the tea is a powdered mixture? Yeah, it tasted like that.

Oh well, we learn something new everyday. Bottled tea, not so awesome ^^”

That day was ‘visiting Asakusa’ day. The Asakusa shrine housed the oldest temple in Japan, Sensoji Temple. If you come across a ‘Travel Japan!’ brochure, without fail, there will be a image of a temple with a bigggggggg red lantern? Yup, that one. Big tourist trap but a must-see nevertheless.

Near the temple area, they have stalls and shops with various food and trinket. It was also here that boyfie was tempted to bring home a katana. All attempts to contact the Malaysian Embassy to ask their policies on importing weaponry failed so we left one sword-less.

I however, was on the hunt for food and came across this!

This is a Taiyaki shop. Taiyaki bears a slight resemblance to our ‘Kaya ball’ here. The difference? taiyaki is usually shaped like a fish! And it has different fillings unlike our kaya ball.

Cute packaging! Fishies all over.

A peek at how big the taiyaki is. I couldn’t take the whole fish outta the packet so no full photo of it =(

I picked a green tea and red bean filling taiyaki. It was pretty good. Not too sweet but it was quite filling to eat the whole thing on my own so it lasted it all the way till dinner.

We were on our own today so we ventured out to the area we were most familiar with at that point in time… Akihabara hehe.

We found a small, cramped noodle shop which displayed all their choices in a glass display outside and you order through a vending machine. Vending machine banzai! (‘Yay for vending machines!’)

One thing we learned in Japan… what you see is what you get.

Sugoi desu! (Wow!) It’s always almost identical to the plastic model you see outside there. Udon in Japan is really quite awesome as their freshly made. So springy!

One thing about these shops in Akihabara… They’re usually small and populated by MEN. Yes, it seems that only the MALE species eat in these noodle shops. They eat really fast, return the bowls to the shop attendant and go off. Not chit-chat with friends. Just focus on the food and nothing else.

So you can imagine how awkward it was for me to be the only female in these noodle shops. There were side glances and polite stares (I have no better description but I could feel eyes piercing through my head even though it wasn’t made too obvious) the whole time I was there.

Back to the food… the pork didn’t have the ‘porky’ smell that I always complain about and the soup is really tasty and the portions decent. I didn’t even mind the poached egg so much cause it was mostly hard than soft. So there isn’t much to complain about these noodles shops besides the weird stares.

Maybe it’s just Akiba *shrugs*.