Tiny Taste of Tokyo
Kamala:
Today we said goodbye to the Royal Park Hotel, but not before the excellent staff helped us copy out the address of our rented apartment in Nagoya in Hiragana, so we could have our luggage delivered. Apparently it’s gauche and inconvenient to carry loads of heavy luggage around town—especially at the train station. So there’s a service called takyubin that will send your luggage ahead to meet you. For us, it would meet us a day later, but that seemed reasonable enough. We packed the essentials for a night and headed out.
The first stop was the Suitengu shrine, where Linda and Kamala offered a prayer, only to later learn it was for babies and easy childbirth.
It was a little rainy for our walk around the Imperial Palace, which is the Emperor’s primary residence, and where many gardens abound. It’s located on the grounds of an Edo-period castle with some impressive giant rock walls, puffy trees, a calming carp pond, a host of freaky spiders, and beautiful tiled-roof structures. Parts of the original palace had been burned down in a conflagration, but it still looked pretty regal, even the guard houses.
Our plan was to take a train to Nagoya that afternoon, but of course we needed to procure the most delectable bento—and the best place to go was the basement of a departo! Daimaru was our choice. I have to admit to being overwhelmed by the variety, but also the care that went into all of the presentation. It was like choosing amongst cases of jewels—and for a quick, cheap train lunch. The banana creme-filled cakes with giraffe print on them, known as Tokyo Banana, caught my eye, but a case of them seemed excessive. Ultimately, Mom and I were suckered in by free samples of squid chips, a very alluring salad case (our best one was broccoli/pesto/avocado/walnut) as well as a set of tiny, cute onigiris.
The train to Nagoya was clean, quick, and took us through some rice paddies and countryside. It felt a lot like the land of Totoro.
The Nagoya Airbnb was easy to find, and much to Linda’s relief, we got the air conditioning cranking. For dinner, we set out to a department store, on the hunt for Nagoya’s specialty: unagi. Our restaurant was located on the mysterious 10th floor, which required us to take an elevator up to the 6th floor and wind through a spa and a gaming store, before a nice young man working at a mobile phone booth, showed us to the correct elevator bank. After some iffy service, we finally got what we came for and it was worth the wait! Smoky dashi, crispy unagi, and a salad with a variety of greens were our reward. Despite aggressive rain storms on the way home, we all made it back in one piece and hit the sack.