JAPAN TRIP 2018 DAY 2 (16/11/18)

I didn’t sleep well.

Seriously, I swear, I won’t ever sleep in the same room as Bruno ever…. his snoring was terrible. Even after eating antihistamine, I still couldn’t sleep for the entire night thanks to his snoring. Geez… I know it’s not his fault but seriously how am I supposed to enjoy my travels if I can’t even sleep a wink at night…? Can’t blame me if I was grumpy AF the next morning right? Sigh.

So today, we had a really forgettable breakfast at Yoshinoya. I was looking forward so much to the barley tofu rice breakfast that I had two years ago… and to our utter disappointment, we found out that the dish was no longer on the menu. I was so sad. Bruno triggered me when he was trying to search online for the same dish from other restaurant, despite me already telling him many times not to bother because that was exclusive to Yoshinoya. He just refused to give up and kept scouring Google until I snapped at him real bad. Geez, why can’t guys take no for no?

We went for our morning caffeine fix at 4/4 Seasons Coffee, at Shinjuku. Our coffee took a long time to arrive, but the atmosphere of the cafe was pretty cosy. Our latte was good – strong yet smooth.

Our original plan was to head to Fuunji for lunch, but as we were too full of disappointment with Yoshinoya (and that we weren’t hungry), we decided to skip Fuunji and went straight to the next place on our itinerary – Shinjuku Gyoen. We initially planned this trip to hopefully get a glimpse of koyo, but unfortunately due to the extreme weather events earlier this year, the koyo period was being pushed back. So when we were there, the leaves were only starting to change. Sigh. Here are some photos of the garden – please click on the Flickr album link below this post for more.

Before we knew it, it was almost 2pm and we were starting to get hungry. We wandered around the streets near Shinjuku Sanchome station to look for a decent restaurant. I decided on a rather “loud” (in terms of facade decoration) ramen restaurant and went for it without checking reviews online. We ordered via a vending machine (which has English words), and were then guided to a table while waiting for food. Service was quick and friendly – and we didn’t need to wait too long when two bowls of ramen were served to us.

I ordered extra portion of spinach – not realising that the ramen already had quite a bit of spinach, so imagine my surprise when my ramen came with a HUGE portion of spinach. Not that I’m complaining… it’s hard to get vegetables in Japan, and I’m a huge fan of spinach too. So it’s a win-win situation for me. The ramen was soooo good! The broth was amazing, and even though I’m not a huge fan of thick ramen noodles, this was certainly good enough for me to finish the entire bowl – except for that small quail egg. So good! Better than Ichiran! (Bruno begged to differ, but this is MY blog, so my opinion is weighted more!)

Only long after I came back from the trip and was trying to submit reviews at Tripadvisor, then I found out that this ramen restaurant is actually a ramen chain called Ikkakuya. I felt so ignorant…

After lunch, we slowly made our way back to Ueno and explored Ameyoko. Good thing we didn’t attempt to find lunch at Ameyoko… most of the food stalls didn’t attract us. Most of the merchandise stalls did not attract us either…. We just walked and walked, and just ended up straight at Niki no Kashi. After spending about an hour there, we finally bought most of the food souvenirs that we needed, and we went back to the hotel to store our loot before we headed out again for dinner.

Dinner was a simple affair… we simply went to eat tendon at Tempura Tendon Tenya, which was just around the corner of our hotel. And it was so cheap! JPY540 (~S$6.50) for this bowl of fresh goodness – there’s prawn, fish, squid, pumpkin okra…

We walked around the neighbourhood a little longer before heading back to the hotel. I dropped by Angelus to buy something for my breakfast the next day. Check out Day 3’s post to know what I bought!

For more photos for this day, as well as for the full sized photos in this post, please visit this Flickr album: Tokyo 2018 Day 2 (16/11/2018)

To return to Japan Trip 2018 content page, please click here.