This is my last Tuesday off until Christmas break when we get two weeks off. I bummed around the house for a bit then went and met Yoko in Nishi-Funabashi to lend her my pack and sleeping bag. She's off to Australia for two weeks on Friday and she didn't have a pack big enough for a two week trip. We bummed around a bit, I showed her how to adjust and pack the pack, then we decided that we didn't want to go home yet, so we headed for Funabashi. I hadn't been there for several months and I had forgotten about how good the shopping is there. It's what you would expect from an Asian city. It's crowded, busy, close and dirty. Tokyo is far too metropolitan and I often forget that I'm in Asia when I'm bootin around Tokyo. Funabashi feels more like what I expected before coming here. Although, by Asian standards it's still incredibly clean and safe. There's gates over the train tracks, no live stock on the streets, and people generally obey traffic standards.
We went to a fab little store called Loft that's full of great housewares and the basement is all cards, paper, and office supplies. I think I'm gonna have to make a trip there to buy some new linens and stuff to send home. It's like a cool, small, IKEA with less selection within items but a greater variety of actual items, and very little furniture. I don't think that makes sense. Instead of having 20 different styles of sheets like IKEA there's 8, but IKEA doesn't have a beauty section or fitness supplies. It's just a little different. So by the time we were done shopping in there I was completely dizzy from lack of food (yes I had been home all day before that, but no, I hadn't eaten anything, no food left in my house, no bike to ride to make a quick trip to the store and I needed to stay near the phone to hear from Yoko) and we decided to forego the hyaku yen shop (the dollar store). We hit a fabulous little place for some kaiten sushi.
Kaiten sushi is usually a small sushi restaurant (although there are bigger places, like the one I just discovered like two weeks ago near the Kita station) where you sit at a counter (sometimes the bigger places have booths) and there's a conveyor that goes round and round the counter bringing the patrons all sorts of yummy sushi-ey goodness. There's usually like 2 pieces per plate and you take what you want and pay by the plate. So by the end you should have a stack of plates, you get up from your seat and some little old lady has counted up the plates and yelled out an amount by the time you reach the cash register. Most middle of the road places are around 100 to 150 yen per plate for the usual type sushi pieces. Some have really fancy things that cost more. The great thing is that the sushi chefs are in the middle of the counter making the sushi in front of you so you get entertainment with your meal. And of course, if you "Sumimasen" them when you don't see what slab of raw poison you were craving, they'll gladly make a plate up for you.
