Thursday in Tokyo had always been designated a “free” day, or mostly free. We had a cooking class booked in for 5pm but the rest of the day was ours to do with as we wished. It ended up emphasising the main travel adage I follow: “when traveling you are never lost, just seeing things that you hadn’t planned on seeing.” A bit glib, but we do the best we can with what we’ve got.
We took out time getting stated in the morning and headed off to the fish market at Tsukiji. We had started out late so all the main action was over by the time we got there. Added to that we hadn’t planned things as well as we might so we just wandered around aimlessly looking at small stalls until we decided to move on. Will had a wish to have lunch in a sushi place, preferably one with a “sushi train” where sushi plates are placed on a conveyor belt that roams around the restaurant. You take off what you want and stack the used plates in front of you. The colour of the plate denotes the price so totalling the bill at the end is pretty quick and easy. We had asked the tour guide on the previous day to give us a couple of options and we had our sights on one at nearby Ginza. And it was here that we finally discovered how hard it is to find your way around the back-streets of Tokyo neighborhoods for non-Japanese such as us. We seemed to wander for ages until we gave up the search and settled for a grill place which was okay, just not what we were looking for.
A quick stop off at Akihabara again for Will to have another look around and then it was back home for a short rest before we had to head out for the cooking course; the saving grace of the day, and, possibly, the whole trip.
When we were in Bali a few years back, Robyn and Catherine had attended a full-day cooking course and had both thoroughly enjoyed it – though I do recall that Catherine wouldn’t eat pork for a few years afterwards. Then we all joined in a course in Vietnam in 2012 so it seemed the best thing to find something similar in Japan. Robyn came across a website titled Cooking Class Tokyo with Mari, checked it out on various review websites and signed us up. We must have got in relatively early as I recall her asking us for a menu. Will is a big fan of Katsudon so that was chosen; Mari added the side dishes. We got to the meeting place at exactly 5pm and found we were in a group of six overall – one young woman from Ireland (her boyfriend was in the pub), a man and his young son from the US and the three of us. I can’t say how highly we enjoyed this evening in Mari’s home. Beautiful ingredients, excellent conversation and we learned some very useful cooking techniques along the way. I didn’t even miss my wine over dinner so I reckon that says quite a lot.
The menu:
Katsudon - pork cutlet with rice
Horenso no Goma-ae – spinach dressed with sesame sauce
Miso soup
Mari Cooking
Cooking class setting
Cooking class participants
Our contact at the local cafe had told us that it might be possible to get some cash out of an ATM at a 7-11, or the Japanese equivalent thereof. We were talking about this on the walk home from the station when Will spotted a store in the street we'd walked down three or four times already. The card worked and we finally had some needed cash. Problems solved.
An excellent end to a truly memorable evening.
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