What sounded like a crazy idea of spending the weekend in Tokyo was made possible by the attractive "Fanfare" offer by Cathay Pacific plus a favorable flight schedule, allowing me to fly out early Friday evening and returning on a red-eye flight early Monday morning, giving me a full 50 hours on the ground. I have been joking about doing this for a while but it's only the first time I actually made this into reality.
While I put down the travel dates purely due to the fact that it's the only free weekend I have that month, turned out there were quite a bit of things happening in Tokyo during that weekend, so the timing was perfect. At the end I got a full schedule on my itinerary (would have been even better if I had known Lisa Ono was going to perform at Blue Note Tokyo that very weekend before the tickets sold out)
It's almost surreal that in less than 12 hours, I moved from endless (and rather meaningless and dull, to be honest) meetings in the office to sitting at the counter of an izakaya in Shinbashi, watching chef flipping skewers of
tsukune and
tebasaki at 1am - definitely a much more meaningful thing to do.
One probably shouldn't expect too much for a random bar in front of the train station opening late on weekends (last order at 2:30am), but food turned out to be decent, the place was packed and it's only a quick 15 minute walk from where I was staying, meaning I didn't have to worry about missing the last train home. I was only planning on a quick bite but turned out I had more than a few chicken skewers to start, followed by a char-grilled wagyu rump steak while sipping on a couple glasses of whisky on the rock. Or was it just because everything taste better when you felt like busy life was miles away?
Didn't have that much time this weekend, so bring it on Tokyo! Having only landed a couple hours ago, I was already feeling the vibe and ready for a full weekend of fun and inspirations at this favorite city of mine!
Stay tuned and check out the rest of the travelogue series:
50 Hours in Tokyo!
Where? Suminoya Dedesuke, 1/F, 3-16-4 Shinbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
On a recent visit to Tokyo, I tried a 24-hour sushi restaurant located close by my Shinjuku-area hotel. I wasn't expecting it to be all that good -- though I did figure it'd be serviceable -- but it turned out to be the best sushi and sashimi meal I had in a week in Japan: better than a sushi restaurant at Tsukiji recommended by Food Sake Tokyo and also an upmarket eatery that's on many people's lists of favorite Matsumoto restaurants! That's the beauty of Tokyo/Japan, eh? ;)
ReplyDelete