Tokyo: Day 2 (Food and other things!) --

After our excursion to the Tokyo Game Show, we had lunch at a restaurant in the nearby mall before going back to Ikebukuro (where we were staying) --

They served katsu (fried stuff) --



I love that they give you a mound of cabbage with your meal. (I love that you can ask for seconds. ^_^)




<-- yummy sauce!



My brother had Deep Fried Oysters. They serve miso soup with the meal and it had tiny clams. ^_^

After our meal, we headed for the station and found this:


It's a cute concept! You pay Y300 and choose a box. The top prize was a Wii but you could also get neat stuff like DS games and iPods. You could also get duds (like we did) ^_^ --





After resting in our hotel and going through our loot from TGS, we walked a few blocks from the hotel to Junkudo, a bookstore.


<-- this entire building is all books and magazines



We went directly to the floor that contained the English books and I ended up buying a nice planner for 2010 and some cute small notebooks to take along in my bag.

Dinner that night was an adventure at Sunshine City! We cooked our own okonomiyaki! It was also my youngest brother's first time to do it so we all had fun figuring it out.





Thankfully, they had a really handy illustrated guide that shows you how to do it:


The meal began with a plateful of gyoza which we had to cook ourselves.


To make sure that you don't burn your food, they have handy sand timers at each table -- the magic number is 4. 4 minutes to cook/steam the gyoza. 4 (x2) minutes for the first side of the okonomiyaki and 4 (x1) minute on the second side.



The gyoza was really delicious. What was interesting was the sauce they served it with -- they call it "basil sauce" (pesto) and I wasn't sold on the idea at first but Johann told me to try it. It was yummy!




<-- mixing the okonomiyaki


<-- flattening, flattening, shaping, shaping ...


<-- waiting for one side to be cooked

After a total of 12-something minutes, this is what it looks like:




We also ordered Octopus with Kimchi and they gave us a foil pouch with the instructions to steam it for 4 minutes.




<-- the octopus was yummy!

We also ordered Yakisoba. The instructions were bewildering (to my brother) so we asked the nice server to cook it for us. (I guess you can also ask them to cook the okonomiyaki for you when they're not so busy...)







It was a yummy dinner! I remember Samantha Brown saying (on one of her shows) that you know you've had a good meal when you come home smelling the food on your clothes. We did -- and the smell was heaven. (Too bad we were scheduled to do our laundry the next morning. ^_^)

Dessert was ice cream at Blue Seal.



Johann had pistachio and I had milk chocolate chip.





We walked around Sunshine City, looking for the Toys R Us -- unfortunately, it was very late at that point and most of the places were getting ready to close.