19Jun / 2015

Japanese Biscuits for the Win

This picture comes with a story. During my first trip to Japan, we went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. After we perused the top floor, my friend checked out the gift shop and purchased a package of biscuits. I’m not a fan of biscuits but she let me try one and my life changed. It was so delicious and I always remembered them. I also couldn’t find it afterwards during the trip. So for this trip, I had a mini mission in mind…to find those biscuits again. I randomly look for them here in Hawaii when I go to Nijiya but I never found them. Guess what? I found them! I saw it in a convenience store in Japan and picked it up…If I learned anything from my previous trips, I knew that when I find something – I have to buy it. There’s a chance I won’t find it again. Thankfully I did, because I really didn’t spot these cookies again during this trip! How do I explain the taste of these? They are both savory and sweet at the same time. Perfect amount of saltiness while maintaining the sweetness of a biscuit, they are toasted and aren’t too hard or soft. I mean, how can a person really sell biscuits? Just buy a pack if you see them and try it for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

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17Jun / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 6 – Food!

No breakfast today. But our dinner made up for that and for Shibuya! Lunch was a bit of a letdown. We didn’t know where to eat so we ended up in Tokyo Station and ate at an Italian Risotto place called Riso Canovietta, it was so junk. I’ll still share the pictures…

This one was mine. Bacon with spinach and carbonara risotto I think. It was that memorable (not). It was bland and disappointing.

Tea time! Well more like coffee time for us. This was a nice little afternoon pick-up in the middle of shopping. A cute cafe in the middle of a very expensive mall, there were a lot of young housewives enjoying their afternoon tea. How lucky…this Kristian’s dessert. He enjoyed it!

We headed back to the apartment after the garden and shopping because we wanted to rest but mostly because we wanted our new wifi device. I know, we’re too reliant to the internet. We got to the apartment and the owner respected our privacy enough to hide it outside of the apartment in his gas closet thing…it was great. Older wifi unit but worked great. We were ecstatic. I don’t know about you but when I get back home after a long day, I don’t tend to head back out. This happened to us too. We finally decided to grab dinner across the street from our apartment. We found a super hole in the wall Chinese restaurant and decided to give them a try. Oh my god. It was such a great decision. By far my favorite restaurant of the trip, which is kind of sad but I don’t care. IT WAS GREAT. The waitress was an older lady and she was very nice to us (much needed after our previous day) and the food was delicious. Let me share…

Can they bring this place to Hawaii? Please?

This dish is as simple as it looks. Scrambled eggs with edamame and shrimp. The eggs were cooked perfectly, not runny or overcooked. The seasoning was probably just salt but it was perfectly seasoned, the edamame was a nice touch and the shrimp was perfectly cooked. It was delicious.

Chicken Karaage – delicious and tender. So good.

Okay how Chinese is this? Lettuce in fried rice, I love it. The lettuce is cooked just to a quick wilt so it maintains its crunch. The seasoning was on point and really hit the spot.

I AM DROOLING LOOKING AT THESE PICTURES. This is their tan tan men and it was so so so good. It was my favorite bowl of noodles in Japan. Perfectly seasoned broth and perfectly cooked noodles. Gosh, it was just a perfect bowl of comfort. I am half compelled to fly back out to Japan to eat this. Really.

Mapo Tofu – at first, we told her we didn’t order this. She nicely told us it came with the food we ordered. Was good! Spicy and delicious. What a perfect way to end day 6….

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15Jun / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 6 – Tokyo

Day 6. Yes, it was the day after the worst day in Japan. It didn’t start off great. Why? Our pocket wifi stopped working, it was super slow or it wouldn’t connect at all. The rare moment I was able to connect, I used it to contact our apartment owner to ask what could be done. We could NOT go around Japan without the use of wifi for our phones! Anyhow, our day was going to be pretty leisurely. Shibuya and Disney pooped us out. We headed to the Tokyo Station and I remembered how to get to the Imperial Palace East Gardens. It’s an awesome garden that is free! Who wouldn’t want to go? It was definitely a nice time for us and it was during this visit that the apartment owner offered to drop off a new pocket wifi unit for us to use! Wasn’t that awesome? Thank God because Kyoto was around the corner! This day was already way better than the day before.

This post is going to be mainly pictures of the garden, I’ll focus on the food in the next post!

The beautiful Tokyo Station

The rule is to take pictures of every sakura you see, I make and follow the rules.

I love walking through this city. It was all so clean and beautiful. Perfect weather. I also love tall buildings so it was all in all a great walk.

Here we are! Garden time!

Making our way to the entrance gate. They issue you a token to get into the garden which you return when you leave. Not sure why they do it, there is no charge to get into the garden.

Just loved seeing the old pay phone here. Even the picture is vintage, this was located at a rest area in the garden.

The garden was a great way to relieve our stress. Next post, food!

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25May / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 5 – Shibuya

The day has come. I am going to share my Shibuya experience now. This day felt like the culmination of all the bad things waiting to happen. First, I think we were both tired from the back to back Disney trips which included all day walking so we weren’t ready for this day. Well, at least I wasn’t ready. I also wore the wrong shoes which made for an even worse shopping trip, my feet hurt from early in the day which put me in a bad mood. No separate food post, all in one post – I apologize ahead of time for all the pics all at once.

Breakfast was from a cute little bakery.

I had a Pesto Shrimp with Cheese Toast with a cup of Iced Coffee. I like Japan’s iced coffee, they serve it with liquid sugar and cream, we should have more liquid sugar here to use.

After breakfast, we did some dollar shopping at Daiso and CanDo. You know me and dollar stores, now I had bags of stuff to lug around from the morning. Then we decided to grab some lunch and found a Genki Sushi. I just had to see what the Japan version had to offer! No regrets here. Very efficient service and everyone single seat has their own ordering screen. Their menu is way cheaper than ours (no spicy tuna, sorry guys) and very clean!

4 Different Preparations of Squid – delicious!

Uni – not good.

Of course I always order the weird thing at each restaurant. They had a cheeseburger nigiri…lol. I mean the burger patty doesn’t even fit on the rice. It was delicious!

Famous Hachiko Statue. I wish this statue was situated in a better place. I get that it needs to be near the subway station he used to wait at but I wish it wasn’t placed in the smoking area. Just doesn’t do him justice, you know? Get plenty people trying to take pictures…and plenty of smokers. I think you can imagine the chaos.

Don Quijote in Japan. Hahaha very crowded and very narrow aisles.

Are these not the cutest?? They were selling these at Loft and I was SO tempted to buy one. But I knew I would never be able to put this together myself so I decided to save my money. I would buy this ready-made, for sure.

So here comes the worst part of the day. We had to grab dinner and I looked up various places on Yelp and decided on Ton-Chang. It took a while to find them because they are hidden in a big building upstairs but we finally did! We walked up the stairs and was greeted by a host in front behind this little counter. I asked if they had an English menu. They did. We got seated and there were only two ladies dining in the entire restaurant. They kept talking to us saying something but we didn’t quite get it, we finally understood that the chairs were barrels that opened up for our bags. Nifty.

So we sit down and start looking through the menu and they start setting up all the sides and the grill. We decide to order a pork set to share. Oh by the way, this is one of those Korean BBQ joints. As we’re waiting, I hear the wait staff talking to one another in Korean. So…the staff are all Korean people. She comes over and bends down in front of me and takes our order, speaking only in Japanese. Okay fine, we point to the set and figure that’s it. She then asks us a question which we both don’t understand. We both say we don’t understand and this girl doesn’t even try to help us understand. As a person who worked in customer service, I would always attempt to help a customer understand. She could have easily pointed to something in the ENGLISH menu to help us understand but she just kneeled there, staring at us. Her face was emotionless but rude, it’s so hard to explain. Finally she excuses herself and decides to help the other table to cook.

It’s funny because the things she says to us in Japanese are definitely in the polite format but with the rudest and coldest tone. As she’s helping the other table, I watched as a girl comes into the restaurant and returns something to the manager behind the counter (previously mentioned him as a host) and well, he’s Korean too because brada starts yelling AND swearing at her in Korean. Seriously. I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. The girl looks taken aback by it but I think she might have been a worker, who knows. It was all so uncomfortable. Then the waitress comes back to our table and kneels down again and asks the same dang question again. Kneels there and stares at us as we say we don’t understand. I ask if anyone knows English. She makes an X with her arms and says no. What were our options then? I was STEAMING mad. I just felt like all her actions were so deliberate and since she refused to help us, we just left. She was completely fine with that. She turned off the stove and grabbed the food to put back (which I can only assume they would serve again). I don’t think I have ever wanted to slap someone as much as I did with her. If you sat there and experienced her purposefully rude behavior, you would never want to go there. The fact that they have an English version of their menu shows that they should have been able to service us. What is the point otherwise? God, that was the single most terrible restaurant experience I have ever had. So glad to write this one last time and get it over with. I did end up writing an e-mail to their company, no response, of course. So I would highly recommend NOT going there. Here’s the dinner I ended up with after a long terrible day.

Yes, cup noodle. Curry cup noodles and it was delicious. Even Japan’s cup noodle is premium, the cheese and meat look and taste fresh – not obviously dehydrated. Day 6 is coming up! Started up kind of junk but definitely brightened up afterwards! Have a good one folks.

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07May / 2015

Japan 2015 – Random Japan Purchases

Quick post to show off some cute stuff I bought from Japan. It’s mostly pictures of the things I got from Natural Kitchen that I wanted to show Jalna. And anyone who wants to be a fan of their stuff!

All from Natural Kitchen – I might be missing a few things but the bulk is here!

Okay I lied, it’s not all just 100 yen stuff. This one was 500! But if we compare it to the price here ($15 – $20), me paying less than 5 bucks was a steal! And this one has much cuter colors!

I was there for the cherry blossom season so they had a lot of sakura stuff! Here is a sakura foam pot rest thingie…so you don’t burn your table tops!

Sakura Coasters

Ah, here are the Laurel scents I was raving about. One drop of Savon and Cherry each into my aroma diffuser and I am in zen mode for the night. My alien looking aroma diffuser is in the background, hehe.

Jalna, you’re gonna get a laugh out of this one. I found these in the dollar store for a dollar each. They don’t sell this kine here, only get the primary color/alphabet kine for kids. I HAD TO GET IT. So I bought 24 of these. YES, 24 of these dang foot long squares. I carried it all around Odaiba back to the apartment and had to stuff them into my suitcase. Everything fit! And these of course offered mucho cushion in my suitcase. And yes, you can see that I initially placed them with the grain facing all crazy ways. I did fix it so they are more wood looking now. I’m nuts yeah? No regrets though!

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29Apr / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 4 – Dinner!

Gosh, we had such a hard time thinking of where to go for dinner this night. We finished Disneyland pretty early and walked back towards the train station when we decided to walk through the Ikspiari Mall and I am SO glad we did! I didn’t realize this mall was Disney owned at first. We first headed to the food court but there was limited choices and not a lot of English menus around. We found a Krispy Kreme and had to eat some. Check out Kristian’s donut…

Sakura Donut! Pretty right? He seemed to enjoy it. It looks a bit too sweet for me…but that’s just me. The pre-dinner dessert was followed by a dinner at Hakata Ippudo. This is a pretty good ramen chain in Japan. My first experience in this restaurant was in New York. I wish they would open this in Hawaii!

Seasoned Bean Sprouts

Pickled Ginger

Pickled Mustard Plant

The classic ramen

I got the one with everything, of course. The black liquid is probably the black garlic oil. This bowl of noodles was good. Nothing that knocked my socks off but definitely a nice bowl of noodles. They were very fast and efficient, glad we came to this restaurant for dinner!

Three must go-to stores at this mall:

Disney Store: Why? If you’re looking for tsum tsum and a lot of the more traditional Disney stuff, go to this store. Big store, good selection!

Natural Kitchen: I think I might have bought out their entire stock. This is a very very very very (very?) cute kitchen item store. It’s ALSO a 100 yen store. I was in heaven. The cutest kitchen accessories for 1, 2 or 3 dollars. I didn’t want to leave! I bought tons of stuff. I love this store. Good thing I didn’t hold back, I didn’t find this store anywhere else.

Laurel: This store is a bit like a bath and body works shop but very minimalistic and simple, nothing over-powering. They had an aroma diffuser running outside of their store and it just drew me in. It was such a wonderful scent and I was so tempted to buy it. But I knew I didn’t have an aroma diffuser at home so I left sadly. As the days went by, the scent never left my mind so I found the another location of the store in Harajuku. THANK GOD. It was a bit hard to find but I totally bought the oils (Savon and Cherry) and haven’t regretted it a bit. In fact, I’m fretting about what to do when I run out of this oil. I’m crazy like that. If Laurel came to Hawaii, I would be in heaven.

Day 5 is Shibuya and it is the post I am dreading to write! It was a really bad day, the worst day of the trip so I’m not exactly looking forward to talking about it. But it must be done! Hope you are all doing well!

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28Apr / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 4 – Food!

Ah yes! The long-awaited final Tokyo Disneyland food post. So sorry it’s taken a bit longer to update these…these posts are definitely more time consuming than my usual posts! It’s been hard to sit down and concentrate lately, lots going on. I didn’t eat as much as I did at DisneySea (thank god) but we still got a lot of good eats in! The biggest surprise at Disneyland? Well, remember how I told you that there was an ice cream cart every five steps at DisneySea? Ice cream was a lot harder to find at Disneyland! I was surprised by that. But that’s okay because I ended up finding the Toy Story alien mochi balls I wanted and they were everything! I should have gotten a second serving…lol. Let’s get to it!

Breakfast. LOL, we just really wanted some regular hot dogs. So here we were! Sorry, I had to giggle at this sign. Yes, I am an adult.

Ratatouille Hot Dog Set, this was like almost $10. Dorothy, we’re not at Costco anymore…

So what is a Ratatouille Hot Dog? It’s just a regular hot dog with tomato sauce and pesto drizzle…oh and chunks of zucchini! It was okay, I think I would just grab a regular hot dog next time.

Just wanted to get a cute picture of a menu. I wasn’t hungry so I didn’t get anything. If I were to order, I would have gotten the Tapioca Drink – no question. And of course the roasted chicken on a Chinese bun. Too cute.

The alien mochi balls! They were SO good. Very very very soft mochi skin filled with different flavor creams.

Strawberry (the best one)

Vanilla/Custard – good!

Chocolate! Ahhh…I wish I could eat these again. They were perfection.

Our lunch was at an expensive buffet restaurant called, Crystal Palace Restaurant. A bit pricey at $25 but in the end, it was actually a super good deal for Disney standards. It gave us a comfortable place to sit for about 2 hours and we had unlimited access to food and drinks. We could easily spend $25 ala carte in the park for much less.

How cute is this plate! Round 1. The variety isn’t that great but the food was good enough.

So this was the special for the day. It was a sausage….on a chicken bone? It was so weird. I mean, they really had to clean up these chicken bones to use as a stick for the sausage. And then it makes you wonder where the meat of the chicken is…because I don’t know if it was in the sausage. The sausage tasted pork-ish.

I got creative and got the soup bowl to make a curry and rice bowl. Easier to eat this way.

Round Two. Hahaha I guess I liked the spaghetti and fish. Actually the fish thing is still going on even now, I wouldn’t mind some fish and chips right about now.

Oh Jesus. Round Three! I needed to get this to get a picture of the carrot.

I got my Mickey face!

Dessert was fresh fruit and jelly. Knowing the price for fresh fruit in Japan – this was a treat!

I talked about the popcorn in my past post. The popcorn mania in Japan is beyond. Everyone had a bucket around their neck – it was like a cult. A cult that I joined. I knew I wanted the classic Mickey bucket but I needed to find my popcorn flavor. It was fate this day. I found the Mickey Bucket with the Shoyu Butter flavor. My mind was made up. How was the popcorn? It was good! Nice and fresh. The seasoning was like instant ramen MSG…lol. I gotta say, the popcorn stayed relatively fresh. I even like transferred some into a ziploc bag to bring home and it didn’t taste too bad when I got home. Disney really knows how to make money. Everyone definitely bought into this craze. There was no line at the orange marmalade flavor stand which I can understand behind completely (blech!).

We ate a pretty late lunch so we actually ended up eating dinner at a restaurant in the Ikspiari Mall. I didn’t realize it was a Disney owned mall and I LOVE that mall. I will share the dinner posts and some thoughts on the mall in my next post!

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21Apr / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 4 – Disneyland

Day 2 of Disney! We were pretty excited for this day. We even left DisneySea a bit early the day before to rest up for today. I was excited to see what Disneyland had to offer. We had a great time at DisneySea so I figured Disneyland would offer the same experience. Well, the staff and sights were definitely great. Like I shared before, we expected more Tsum Tsum stuff here but the stores basically sold the same items as the stores in DisneySea! The lines were once again super long, some of them were 3 hours long! Good thing I don’t ride rides.

Time to head into the happiest place on earth! Wait, does that apply to all Disney sites??

I loved seeing all the balloons! How fun is the job of the girl who gets to hold the huge bunch of balloons? The Disney castle can be seen as we walked in. Disneyland was definitely busier than DisneySea.

New Orleans! Cute stuff. Wish I could go up there and take pictures…hehe

Another ride I could handle. It’s a Small World. Can I just say that those dolls are some kind of creepy? It was an…interesting ride.

My first Japan Cherry Blossom experience was at Disneyland! Maybe it IS the happiest place on earth! It was the only trees in bloom on the entire property but they were SO pretty. I was very happy to have seen them!

Sorry, so many pictures of flowers. I didn’t take much pictures of the park!

I did of course take pictures of the castle. Who wouldn’t?? It’s so beautiful and looks just like the one before Disney movies. Enchanting.

Do you know what this is? It’s a popcorn holder. Every park had different stations with different popcorn flavors and different character containers to hold the popcorn. You could of course buy popcorn to eat out of a paper bag but who does that at Disney?? I was too tempted and finally bought this. It was so cute. And yes, I wore it proudly around my neck. I’ll share more about this popcorn container along with the food in the next post!

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20Apr / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 3 – Food!

Warning: The following pictures may induce a food coma. Enter at your own risk. And yes, this is what I ate. No shame in my game. Okay, there is shame because I realized there are a lot of pictures as I uploaded them for this post. But hey, that’s basically why we went (right?). So…good…drool…

Meat Pie! First “snack” of the day. Delicious mince meat filling in a very flaky pastry crust. It was like a gourmet puff pastry hot pocket. Delicious!

Sausage in a Bun – I guess this is their version of a hot dog? Does not taste like a hot dog at all, definitely a very Japanese sausage. Tasted okay, not something I would get again.

I was too curious about this one! Sea Salt Ice Cream!

It was pretty good! Not really salty. Vanilla Ice cream, strawberry jam all in a wafer like shell. The wafer is very bland and felt like we were chewing on styrofoam but it tasted fine!

Churro – this was not great. Also! It’s one of the few things shaped into Disney shapes! You can’t tell looking at this now, but it’s actually a Mickey Mouse face shape. I thought the churro was a bit too spongy, didn’t taste right.

Famous Disney Turkey Leg – I had to get it. Had to. Even if it’s for the experience! Well, they cooked it perfectly. Very juicy and tender. This is a very smoky tasting turkey leg. It tasted good but a bit too smoked for my taste.

Genoa-style Seafood Salad

Linguine, Seafood Genovese

This was our lunch from their Cafe Portofino. Very cute little Italian eatery. You order in the cafeteria type line, pay and take a seat. They give you a little token with your food but I was surprised they knew where to find us to deliver the food. The token is not very obvious but I shouldn’t be surprised at how organized Tokyo Disney would be. It was a very good day, pricey (where in Disney isn’t it pricey?) but good. Next up, Tokyo Disneyland!

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19Apr / 2015

Japan 2015 Day 3 – Disney Sea

Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea were definitely planned before the trip was even booked! My friend is a Disney fanatic and a big fanatic for tsum tsums, both the game and the stuffed animals! One would expect Disneyland or DisneySea to have all that…it didn’t! That’s my warning to you! He found the tsum tsums he wanted from the Tokyo Skytree Mall Disney Store, they barely had tsum tsums at the theme park! Mainly cute accessories like phone cases and stuff, not the stuffed dolls! Can you believe it?

Anyway, I like visiting Disney theme parks but I don’t ride rides. It’s mainly because I get sick easily and I’m not looking to throw up all through the day. But I genuinely don’t mind waiting on the side as others ride rides…for me, the experience of walking through the park is enough! DisneySea is unique to Japan only so I was curious about what it had to offer! It’s very similar to their theme parks, it’s just an ocean theme and a lot of nice scenic water views. Japan Disney is on point on everything. I think if you went to Japan Disney and then went to the other parks, you’d be disappointed. The service, the cleanliness, the food, it’s all so amazing.

And the Japanese people…LOVE Disney! It’s very busy all the time! And Disney knows how to get their money. Hahaha the biggest thing I noticed about DisneySea was of course the popcorn and then the love of ice cream. Even with the cold weather, there was an ice cream kiosk everywhere I turned. I ate a lot this day…lol. But that’s the post for tomorrow.

Disney was planned for the beginning because our trip was about 10 days long and we had purchased a 7 day JR pass so we weren’t going to activate our pass until later on in the trip. We figured we would spend all day at Disney for two days so that would be smart to do them before the JR Passes were activated. It’s very easy to get to Disney, we jumped on the Yamanote Line and transferred to the Keiyo Line and headed to Maihama. Maihama is the stop for Disney. We didn’t know much so when we got to Disney, we purchased a Disney rail pass. It cost about $8 and would be good for two days. It’s a cute little rail that runs on a loop and takes you to the entrance of both Disney parks and their resort hotels. I think we realized too late that we could have easily walked to the parks from Maihama station but it’s okay. It was a cute experience and the rail has cute details! Let’s get to some pictures!

As I always say, the little details count!

Beautiful DisneySea, this is the view as you walk in.

Many groups of friends dressed in the same exact outfits. This was probably a line for picture taking with a Disney character. I also noticed kids enjoy wearing their school uniforms around the park.

I know these are like “fake” buildings built for Disney but I still felt like it was such a beautiful view. I don’t care how artificial it was, I felt transported! I was also excited to see their band give a performance. It was a great start!

They were very good! Every member was very animated and I loved how each person had their own solo. It was super cool. They played versions of famous Disney songs. I loved it!

Yup, I went to Italy.

There she blows! Nice detail!

I think this was part of the Indiana Jones exhibit

I got sucked into Disney. I bought a cell phone case and matching lariat from Disney fever. It was expensive but a nice souvenir.

One of the few rides I could handle. A gondola ride! It was very nice and we were at the front of our line so I got to sit in the good seats (in my opinion). These guys were pros but they also only spoke Japanese and also sang in Japanese? It was pretty cool. As they would pass the other gondolas, they had cute games or conversations ready to go between gondolas.