Day 3
Courtesy of jet lag, I woke up at 3am. It was too cold outside to wander, so I killed time in the room until 5:30am and then got layered up for a walk. I visited Senso-Ji again and squeezed off some photos without the usual throngs of people. After that I walked the few blocks back to the hotel for breakfast. Hotel breakfast was a mix of East and West. I had this plate (below) all three days, plus seaweed salad and some sort of creamy soup I should’ve taken a picture of because it was awesome.
Western breakfast at Asakusa View Annex Rokku
When we lived in California there was a Kura revolving sushi in Cupertino, a few miles from our house. They were always doing a brisk business… the kind of place where you want to “get in line” using their app about an hour before you’re ready to eat. When I saw that there was a Kura two blocks over from my hotel I figured I’d check it out and see if it was similar to Cupertino.
It was not easy. I go to the address. Google Maps is telling me I’ve arrived, but I’m walking through a department store selling jeans and knickknacks and home goods, and there are NO signs for Kura.. or at least not using characters I recognized. I do some Googling and they say it’s on the 4th floor. Fine. But even getting off the escalator on the 4th floor it’s not clear. I walk the perimeter and finally find a monitor mounted to a wall next to a sink. It looks like this is the front of the restaurant? There’s no host stand or anything, only a screen. I should’ve taken a picture; it was very unassuming and a little unwelcoming tbh. I pull out Google Translate and yes, this is the check-in place. I seem to tap the correct button, indicate 1 person, and it prints out a receipt with the number 47 on it. I head inside…
… and am at least smart enough to figure out that I need to find seat 47.
Once seated there’s a QR code you can scan to open a page on your phone. From there you can order a la carte items, as well as choosing items from the conveyor belt.
I did a little of both. One side note about Google Translate and its camera feature: It’s really cool to be able to point your phone at a sign and have it translate it in real time. It does a pretty good job — enough for you to get this gist. My challenge here is that I wanted to translate what I was seeing on my phone’s screen. I ended up in this cycle of 1) screenshotting my phone, 2) opening Google Translate, 3) clicking camera, 4) clicking the upload image button, 5) uploading the screenshot, 6) getting the translated result back, and then 7) figuring out what it means. Rinse, repeat. It worked but yeah… it got old. But you know what? I was able to eat at a restaurant in Japan where there was zero English and leave satisfied. I’ll take the win.
For the afternoon, I walked ~2km to the Tokyo National Museum. Here’s a bit of that walk. Truly I could’ve spent a lot more time at the museum, but by mid-afternoon my energy was really starting to flag so I started my walk back.
The Buddha Amida, 1147
Once back at the hotel I spent some time relaxing in the lounge, enjoying the view, and catching up on laptop work.
I was too tired for a proper dinner and ended up defaulting to a few konbini items from FamilyMart around the corner, then calling it an early night.