lost in translation!

today we walked to shimbashi station and had some katsu /curry katsu don in one of those slot coin/coupon small eateries - that was filled with men during office lunch time, i was the only lady in there. i loved the crispyness of the katsu and the plum sauce on top too. these eateries are quite value for money in general beacause it's expensive to eat in the restaurants in japan.

we took the train up to akihabra where mingyao wanted to look at some electronics. we chanced upon a furniture/lifestyle shop with 5 levels that brought in really nice things like walter knoll and artemide and artek and poliform and etcetc. anyway akihabra, the place is like a sim lim square with street shops outside as well. we spent about two hours there before walking to another metro station to take the train to ginza because we wanted to check out the toaster shop and we also checked out some other shops along the way - mainly itoya which sold 7 levels of stationery, which was kinda cool cept that it wasn't very new cos we're exposed to some jap and other pretty cool brands cept that the nice leather ones were so expensive. we had a drink at wendy's just to rest our feet and shared a beef and chilli fries watching the people cross the road and we walked to tokyu hands and then we walked back to ginza corridor to check out the shops for dinner but they were either too expensive or had no pictures or english so we couldn't make out what the menu was. we went back to the hotel to rest for an hour before going out to find dinner. walking for about half and hour before we chanced upon a delicious aroma from the basement of one of the alleyway shops we went downstairs and decided to just eat there cos the menu prices didn't look too scary and it was difficult to choose alot of the other shops because the menu was all in japanese.

it was quite entertaining because the waitress couldn't really understand english but she tried her very best in her apologetic and energetic mannerisms to explain the menu to us. we finally settled on some fish - not bad, tangy with lemon; grilled chicken - this was great, the skin was so fried it was almost like keropoke and we dipped it in this interesting green sauce that tasted very salty with a slight later spicy taste; some beef brisket kimchi soup and grilled sotong. i think it was actually a pub and these were bar food because we asked for rice and she was trying to explain, i think, that they didn't serve rice; she kept running back to and from the kitchen to try and translate our english with the staff behind and at one point when mingyao asked if the dish contained oninons she ran in and appeared with as huge spring onion to confirm with us.


on the way back we bought some ice cream wrapped in cream puff pastry at a shop for a hundred yen each - it wasn't as cold as yesterday.

we bought some japanese chips from the supermarket and tried this really interesting one - sweet potato flavour and it was sweet instead of salty.