A Fish and tai-chi dawn

What do you do when the jet-lag gets you up at 4am in Tokyo??

The short answer is : you find a fish market, then hang out at the imperial gardens (then head back to the hotel for a lunchtime nap). But that does not mean it was an uneventful day and the long story of it goes something like this...

Since we both failed to stay awake past 6pm last night, which is about when we expected to pass out, we woke up before the crack of dawn, after a solid 10 hour sleep. Being wide awake at 4 am in Tokyo has its advantagtes though as thats when the fishmarkets open! So of course we took advantage of the situation and made tracks for that. After some searching we found it, and on the way acquired a handful of other travellers who were also lost and looking for it. And it was quite interesting...

From Tokyo fishmarket and palace

It was heaving, both with tourists and employees, and watching all the fishmongers was fascinating - they were all quite specialised at their tasks. You had the furrier boys who only pulled carts laden with the produce, the gutters who only gutted fish, so naturally you missed it if you blinked. Then there were the price-taggers who semed to only be restocking and pricing fish and of course the purhasers who inspect and buy fish at the auction. This was the piece-de-resistence (pardon my french) and watching the auctioneer shout prices like a machine-gun and hearing the bells indicating the imminent end of the auction was quite catching. Since this is the event most tourists come for, apparently we have become a nuicanse, so we are not allowed to roam freely anymore but instead we are put in a tiny area near the back overlooking the least interesting bit, the frozen tuna sales. Take a picture of the auctions outside of the 'tourist-pen' and you are quickly ushered inside by a man with a multi-lingual sign. This applies even if you have escaped the pen, as we quickly found out, but we did manage to escape it in the end and went hunting for the breakfast sushi stalls. But only after deciding that this little fellow we found earlier was indeed the ugliest fish around. Can anyone supply us with a name for it? We'd like to know.

After shadowing a group of Japanese looking tourists (revealed by their lack of wellingtons) we did find a little hole-in-the-wall that served sushi, and it was indeed straight from the market and very yummy. The only thing we lacked was a little elbow-room, but who can complain about that really, and of course coffee, which no breakfast is complete without, but Starbucks on the way to the Imperial palace, which was the next stop, fixed that.

It was about an hour or so of a walk to get to the Palace Imperial gardens, including the coffee break, through a virtually empty Tokyo, remember, after all these adventures it is still only 7 a.m!! Which we only realised by the fact that we were customers #2 and 3 at Starbucks this morning a full 5 minutes after they opened :). But even getting there at almost 8 the path to the Palace gardens was virtually empty, and strolling around them as the morning sun started to rise above the skyrises.

>>>Vaniah<< Johan has nodded off so I'm taking over. As he mentioned, the journey to the Imperial gardens was possibly better than the gardens themselves and very beautiful in the cloudless Tokyo morning sunshine. When we got to the entrance of the gardens, we were disappointed to find that they were closed, and only after a brief discussion amongst ourselved realised that it didn't open until 9am and it was indeed only 8:30! So we wandered off to amuse ourselves for half an hour but instead were previleged to find this guy enjoying the peace of the morning. I can assure you that we kept a respectful distance.

The gardens themselves were quite beautiful, I think though that they were designed to be enjoyed in the springtime when all the cherry and plum trees are in full bloom and the gardens become a sea of colour. On our visit however the predominant colour was green and without a guide to tell us the story behind the gardens, it was only a peaceful and lovely place.

The final big adventure of the day was lunch. By 11:30 we were both ravenous so determined not to spend more than we should we looked for a local lunchtime place and found this outside a place full of local Japanese businessmen...

The idea seemed to be that you order and pay for you food using the machine, then go inside where it's been prepared for you and pick it up. Of course, it's all in Japanese however some of the buttons have helpful pictures on them. After randomly pressing a few buttons a note was printed. Afraid that we had mistakenly ordered half the menu, we went inside and signaled panic to the chef. He then came outside and helpfully showed us how it worked. Phew! Btw, if you'd like to know the secret, e-mail us and we will be happy to reveal all :)

After a final random meeting with a very pleasant Englishman who gave us some suggestions of places in Tokyo to visit, we headed back to the hotel to have a nap before meeting up with some friends tonight. And here we are...