First, a couple of pictures from Teman’s place. As some people may know, there is a difference between how Japan and the USA does bathrooms. Japan separates the toilet facilities from the shower/bath/sink & mirror facilities. Teman’s place has both an upstairs and downstairs toilet room equipped with an impressive high-tech toilet. They have heated seats, automagically detect when you get up and flush on their own, and have built in bidet-like functionality that so far I’ve been a little scared to try. If you look next to the towel there’s a panel to used to control its operation. I need a new toilet at home, I wonder what something like this would set me back…
The bath part is also a little bit different than what you see back home. The bath is not only a cleaning ritual, but a important way to relax at the end of the day. To this end, the bath is set up so that you shower and clean yourself off before you actually get into the bath. Since the shower is separate from the bath, the floor has a drain built in. Teman’s bath has a cover so that the bath can be kept warm and a panel to either control temperature or autofill at a given time.
Anyways, after laboring over yesterday’s blog post I decided to try and make it over to Asakusa on my own while Teman and Sayaka were at work. Asakusa is a part of Tokyo next to the Sumida River that is well known for Senso-ji temple (also known as Asakusa Kannon).
This was the first time I had tried to use the subway on my own so I set out with some trepidation but it turned out getting there was pretty straight forward, I just had to walk over to Gaienmae station, hop on the Ginza line, and take it all the way to the end. The subway system, a least along along the Ginza line, is very easy to use. The stops are all announced in english as well as japanese and they have a nice little indicator above each door that shows all the stops (again in english as well) on the line. As you go from stop to stop a bar under the next stop lights up as well as an arrow showing which direction the subway is heading.
After initially walking the wrong way once I got off the subway I backtracked and found that Nakamise, the main shopping street that leads to the shrine, was just across the street if I would have walked the other direction. A lot of of the stores around Asukusa are more touristy or budget minded in comparison to wandering around the trendy places around Shibuya/Harajuku/Omotesando however there were a number of places selling a wide variety of very tasty looking snacks.
The temple itself was impressive and it was interesting to just linger and listen to the monks chant for a while. The smell of the incense that people offered before you got to the main temple lingered through the whole square and added to the ambiance. The place was just crawling with tourists, both foreign and local, however if you wandered a bit farther from the main temple it thinned out really quickly. I found a little shrine area that a (artificial?) stream running through it that was quite tranquil and snapped a lot of photos there. They were doing a lot of construction, both on the main gate and around Asakusa Shrine, so I didn’t really check out the shrine. The shopping area extends out for blocks and blocks and I spent quite some time wandering around exploring before I hopped back on the subway to head home before the commuter rush.
After Teman and Sayaka got off work we headed out to one of their favorite ramen shops. We split an order of gyoza that were garlicky, quite meaty, and a bit different than I have had before and then moved on to the main course - Dragon Ramen. Imagine a huge bowl of ramen with a couple of chunks of sweet, tender pork almost the size of your fist along with hardboiled egg, some sliced green onion, a small whole tomato, and a single little octopus tentacle on a skewer in a light miso broth - it was sooo good and very filling.
Photos for todays adventure can be found on my Flickr page.