Friday 26 June 2015

Day 3: Visiting Asakusa - Nakimise Street, Sensoji Temple and The Skytree

It was a bright and cheery morning. 
By now, my mother had enough of sushi. I was determined to eat something different. So ramen it was.

It was also a shop supposedly just a few minutes walk away from Hotel Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku, but GoogleMap was as usual, unreliable, and I was lost after a while. Fortunately, a man who was on his way to work helped me using his GoogleMap and led me to the shop just a few doors away.
We took the lift down to B1 and came to a vending machine. I chose 2 ramen, 1 extra portion of noodles and 1 egg as advised by the Tripadvisors. After that, I slot in the coins as payment and picked up the 3 tickets that slid out and proceeded to enter the shop.
The waiting area is on the right while the doorway to the seating area is on the left.
I placed the 3 tickets on my counter and a Japanese girl attended to me, asking me,"English or Chinese?"

After she collected the tickets, she passed me this piece of paper. I needed to choose how oily or spicy I wanted my soup to be, or whether I wanted sliced pork and other ingredients. First-time visitors are advised to choose 'medium' and 'half' for the various items. 

We were sat at a counter-like table.

How my bowl of ramen with extra noodles and extra pork slices looks like

With a half-boiled salted egg (not salty at all!)

After the tasty and satisfying ramen, we took the subway to Asakusa.

We entered the Nakimise Street via the back gate and walked the busy street to the front gate of Sensoji Temple. 
Both gates hung a huge lantern each.
The busy Nakimise Street
 Nakamise Street ware

Baby bought a Mount Fuji fan for 800 yen, while my mother bought a calf leather bag for about S$200.
We could not get enough of the cooling and delicious mango shaving!
We saw the locals shaking some tins for their fortune

"If it bodes well, bring it home;
if it doesn't, tie it (there)."

My mother's good fortune

The busy Sensoji Temple

We had walked to the Hanayashiki Amusement Park that was located just behind the Temple. It is Japan's oldest amusement park and enjoys good reviews. Unfortunately, the whole park was closed for maintenance. My sister joked that it was very old indeed to have the whole park under maintenance!

We tried the vanilla and green tea ice-cream burgers!

One ice-cream burger for 320 yen

The ya-ya stall-holder selling his small pancakes with chocolate filling. 
Just ordinary. 

The refreshing and cooling ice green tea for 110 yen per cup! Love it! 
Never knew that green tea could taste so good!

We walked to a subway station just to realise that it was not the right one (again!), so we walked out of the station and went in search of THE right one.

This is the Tobu Station to Skytree

Just one stop to Skytree

It was about 2 or 3pm. We got the tickets within 20 minutes.

Whether you are going to the Tembo Galleria at 450m, you need to buy the Tembo Deck tickets for a 350m view at 4th floor first. You can only buy the 450m-view tickets at Tembo Deck.

After getting the tickets, there was another queue for the lift to ascend to 350m.

It was the Skytree's 3rd anniversary.

The view at 350m


Then Baby was hungry, so we had to eat some cakes at the Skytree Cafe.


The wonderful public toilet seat at the Skytree

Not just Tokyo Tower has a glass floor. Skytree has a small area of glass floor too! 
Teenage school boys love to stomp hard on it to show how brave they are!

So we bought the 450m view tickets


There are pictures of the skyscrapers stating the names of the buildings that you might see.
I could not recognise most of them.

The 450m view
My mother missed the sushi we had the first day we touched down, so we went there again. This time, I placed an order for the Chef's recommendation, and just about half of them consisted of cuttlefish or squid. They were hard or too chewy for our liking. We were disappointed this time.


Directions:

Ichiran Shinjuku Central Higashiguchi
3-34-11 Shinjuku, Shinjuku, Tokyo Prefecture
Local name 一蘭 新宿中央東口店
Local address 新宿3-34-11ピースビル B1F (Basement 1)

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