Day 6 - Kappabashi Shopping District

We went to Kappabashi for lunch. This area is a street full of restaurant supply shops. If you're looking for knives, woks, plates, trashcans, "no smoking" signs (not as popular here), or just tacky stuff to decorate a theme restaurant, Kappabashi is the place to go. Kristen's been wanting some small pottery bowls and sure enough, we found the small pottery bowl shop - they had hundreds of different ones to choose from. We also went into several cutlery shops, but we weren't quite sure if razor sharp knives were the right addition for our kitchen.

For lunch, Cricket took us to a okonomiyaki restaurant. It's an odd combination of fundue (in that you cook it yourself), a Japanese steakhouse (you're gathered around a flaming hot griddle), and pancakes. The weather outside was about a thousand degrees (that's celsius) and humid, and we were hunkered down around a hot griddle. The all-you-can-drink water was self-serve from a dispenser across the room into tiny sake cups - kind of hard to get cooled off. Luckily they served Sapporo in the "Legular Saiz" that I'm now accustomed to.

We did three different pancakes - one with egg, shrimp, cabbage, the second with cheese, corn, and mochi (sticky rice), and the third was yakisoba grilled soba noodles with cabbage and "edible plants". Like many foods here, they add a genereous dash of MSG (patented by the Japanese Ajinimoto Corporation in 1909) for flavor. Kristen has been working hard to get the chopsticks thing down. This stuff was a particular challenge to eat with sticks. She's mastered a grab and twirl motion like eating spaghetti with a fork.

I went a little hungry at this stop (I'm not much into cabbage or "edible plants"), but the girls enjoyed it and it was really lots of fun - something we certainly wouldn't get to do at home. Just before we left, Cricket pointed out that the table next to us was making a pizza with a pile of bacon.