TacoCat’s Travels #67 (Japan 2.0): Cruising down Character Street! ...

Hey Hive/Steemit!

If you didn't catch the last couple of posts, this series is about our trip to Tokyo (again) way back in August 2016, when we went there for a short international exchange program called Promoting Asian Leadership (PAL) with Keio University! The program was a week long, but we went there a few days ahead of time to explore and revisit our favourite places.

Last week, we kicked off the first day of our program with Keio with an excursion to The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, also known as *Miraikan* (or literally, "Future Museum")!

It was really cool seeing all the high-tech stuff like the space capsule and some androids they were working on. A real insight into the future of technology.

But anyway, I was getting really fed up with the Keio students because they were literally everywhere with us and there were so many of them for just the 8 of us international students. And because we were all bunking together in 1 house we never really got a moment alone.

So, when they said that they were taking us on an overnight onsen trip in some place outside Tokyo, I made an excuse saying I didn't feel well enough to go. At least Sean and I would have 2 days without all these strangers around. Thank goodness.

5 August 2016. Friday.

We didn't have much plans today. We pretty much just slept in until they all left and by that time it was well past noon. So we didn't have much daylight left and we were a little tired to go exploring too far away anyway. We decided to get some food first before heading off elsewhere!

The house was located near Tokyo Station so we started walking towards the station and found this ramen shop!

We've never seen this shop before but what caught our eye was the menu signboard they had outside the shop! It showed a bowl of ramen that was completely covered with chashu on top! Here's a better picture of the signboard (from a different branch):

We were kinda skeptical because many ramen shops tend to be quite stingy with their chashu (I'm talking about you Ichiran) but we were also pretty hungry so we decided wthecc, let's see if their picture lives up to the real thing or if it's just trick photography.

And boy were we pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong! The picture is exactly as is irl, with the chashu completely covering the noodles and everything:

We ordered that bowl of ramen that came with a small bowl of grilled chashu rice, and a second of ramen with less chashu (which is cheaper):

And I have to say that is definitely one of the best ramen bowls I've ever had! The noodles were firm but not too hard, the chashu was tender and plentiful, the soup was average but for the price and the quantity of chashu it was really good! And the grilled chashu rice bowl was amazing as well! It was lightly crispy, a tad salty but the sweet sauce helped, and you could really taste the charcoal in the grilled chashu. Sooo goood! 😋

We were so stuffed from that meal. I could barely finish my bowl of ramen and it wasn't even the big size that Sean got. But it was also the first meal we had that day so (I physically can't eat much during the first meal).

If you wanna find out more about this ramen chain, definitely check out my tasteem post on this I did a couple months back!

Anyway, after that scrumptious meal (which definitely put me in a much better mood), we headed to Tokyo Station's Character Street! It's pretty much on every travel checklist I see of Tokyo so I was curious to see how good it was.

So we boarded a train to Tokyo Station!

It wasn't too far away thankfully; we arrived in less than 15 minutes!

If you've never been to Tokyo Character Street before, it's a shopping concourse inside Tokyo Station with more than 30 shops that sell merchandise of popular Japanese characters, anime, manga.

And the first thing we saw was Domo!

Sorry for the blurriness. It was pretty crowded.

They had all sorts of characters there, including one of my favourites - Snoopy!

I didn't realise Snoopy was such a huge thing in Japan until this trip, and I think this was the first Snoopy shop I've ever seen (we don't have this in Singapore)! It was a mini one but still. It was cool to see all the different types of Snoopy merch they had.

We didn't end up buying anything because everything was actually really expensive! And since I wouldn't find much use for them/already had those things it didn't make sense to buy overpriced versions of items I already had. I guess this is what adults feel like.

After taking a quick look around and some photos, we headed to the other shops!
They had Winnie the Pooh stuff:

And Kirby:

Hello Kitty:

Rilakkuma:

Which we actually did enter since it was kinda empty.

And also because I like the chicky; whose name I learned is Kiiroitori, which means yellow bird in Japanese.

They also had a LEGO store:

A Totoro store:

And finally, the Pokemon store! Which I believe was the last of 3 in Tokyo that we visited.

It was especially crowded so we didn't get to see much of the merch in the back, but they did have a cute train station Pikachu there!

There were a lot of other anime and manga shops with merch from Bleach, One Piece, Dragonball Z, etc. But since we're not really into those animes we just walked past them. There were pretty much people everywhere which made it hard to look at stuff in the small shops anyway.

So after walking pretty much the whole Character Street, we headed to the arcade! We played a couple rounds of Mario Kart and guess who won! 😄