Tokyo, Japan - Day 4

Our final statement - *Bury us in all of the Japanese food. We’ll take any of it.*

What we did:
- Started off the morning (relatively) early for us to make it to a suburb of Tokyo an hour away from us to do a cooking class. Grabbed some train station baked goods and coffees and we were off! As always, such a pleasant and orderly experience on these trains. The CTA could learn a thing or two from the Japanese. Got to our destination station and realized we were running tight on time so rather than taking the bus we opted for the “Go” taxi to get us there on time
- The cooking class was at our instructors house and we were joined by 4 other people. A young couple from Austria and two young dudes from Green Bay. Since this was the week of the infamous packers/bears game, Trent attempted talking some friendly smack only to realize that these guys were definitely not of the sporty type. After a swing and a miss, we found their conversation topic of choice - anime and video games (par for the course in Japan).
- Compared to other cooking classes we’ve taken this one was relatively easy as she had prepped most of the ingredients for us. Most of the students' activities really just involved stirring and chopping. We made gyoza and soy sauce based ramen. After seeing all the prep that goes into a traditional ramen dish (boiling bags of dried fish, braising the pork belly, etc), it’s safe to say that Steph and Trent won’t be doing this at home anytime soon.
- It was fun to talk with our instructor who taught herself English from watching American TV shows, namely “Friends”, and learn about her husband's
Sake business. We tried some off her husband's products - a lemon cello type sake, a matcha ice cream, and some chocolate - all delicious! Sufficiently stuffed and feeling like chefs, we sought out to buy some gifts for back home!
- We then ventured back into Asakusa to make our way through Kappabashi Kitchenware Town in search for ornaments, matcha tea bowl sets, and mugs to bring back. While we didn’t find much in the town we found a more touristy district of the area in which we found everything we were looking for!
- After a successful morning we took off to Akihabara, better known as Electric Town for its numerous electronics store, anime shops, maid cafes, and old school gaming. We wandered the brightly colored and lit up streets and popped into a few old school gaming shops to relive the glory days of Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. We also looked at some of the many many crane/claw game stores but couldn’t find any prizes worth losing our money for. In the end, we found ourselves the only patrons of an all you can drink basement dart bar. A couple drinks, and an hour of darts (Trent and Steph both one a game of cricket) and we were ready for our next meal!
- Took the train back to our home base of Shibuya for one last ramen stop. The portions were massive and having two ramen meals in one day that were both so different from one another and so delicious was a great experience. We did one last Shibuya scramble before capping the trip at our favorite hotel rooftop bar. A couple of drinks admiring the Tokyo skyline and reminiscing on our favorite parts of the trip. You were good to us, Japan.
- Early bedtime for our long flight to LAX to end our trip with the last wedding of the year in Palm Springs! Our food tour of Japan & Korea now over, we will constantly be chasing some of the most amazing flavors we tried over here.

What we ate:
- Train station bakery - cooking class was about an hour and a half away via train so picked up some quick sweet and savory pastries with some coffee in the train station.
- Cooking class - we learned how to make gyoza and ramen at our cooking class. Gyoza was pretty straightforward but the ramen was definitely time and ingredient intensive! Glad we were able to participate in an authentic cooking experience.
- Chūkamenten Kiraku - the last ramen of the trip! Sad! We wanted to try one last type - dumpling ramen. Only 3 dishes to choose from, trent got the spicy dumpling ramen and Steph got the regular dumpling ramen. The portions were huge!! Not our favorite type of ramen we had, but definitely the most filling!

Fun facts:
- Tokyo has an infinite number of “gaming spots” filled with just claw/crane machine games. It is a fascination for the culture and is often visited by the locals numerous times per week. They contain a variety of different prizes form your regular carnival teddy bear, to boxed ramen, candy, electronics, games, and more.Læs mere