Day 16: Shinjuku Gyoen Park

While we loved the Asakusa area that we stayed in the first week the Shinjuku area is by far more active and filled with things to do. Doing a little bit of research into things that you have to do if you visit Japan shows a couple of things in Shinjuku itself. One of these is the local garden. While we've visited a few gardens in our time here this one is a bit different. It was built in the Edo period and was used by the Imperial family around the beginning of the 20th century. The garden features three distinct zones meant to display traits of different types of gardens. One area is French, the other is English and the final area is a traditional Japanese garden.

Chrissy liked the huge leaves

Our first stop in the park was a rose garden, while the roses were nice it was obvious that the weather was starting to get a bit cold for them. Then we walked around a bit through the English and French areas before hitting the area that we were really interested in, the traditional Japanese garden.

There were a ton of people here.

The skyscrapers hovering over the garden was very surreal

Huge Koi as always

After our time at the park we did some more walking around the Shinjuku area. There's an area here called "Electric Street" that has a lot of electronics stores. Nothing too crazy there that we hadn't already seen in areas like Akihabara but it was fun to check out.

Spiderman = Ninja in New York apparently

Day 15: Gone Fishin'

Our first full day in the Shinjuku area ended up being one of our favorites of the whole trip. Chrissy had heard about a place called Nakano Broadway. I figured this was some theater or something, it turns out is a nerd mecca on par with or possibly even better than Akihabara.

We spent all day here shopping around and eating. I'd show you a picture of all of the stuff we got but some of it is just too crazy, you'll just have to stop by the house some time to see them all displayed. I also finally got my white whale of this trip, an Alien figure. I'd been wanting one since we got here and would find them at different stores here and there. Literally every single time we found one it was sold out, and they won't sell you the display model for some reason...

So after wasting a ton of money on Chinese plastic in the shape of our favorite pop culture characters we sat down to get some snacks and rest our feet. Little did we know we would be treated to the largest toast either of us had ever seen.

By the time we were done at Nakano it was already pretty dark and rainy so we decided to make attempt number two to make it to the local restaurant that we had trekked across Shinjuku in search of our first night. It is call Zauo, it is on the first floor of the Shinjuku Washington Hotel and you get to do this...

The shark is their "pet", we were kindly asked not to catch him

That's right, you actually get a pole and some bait and catch your own dinner. It seems like a gimic but it was actually a lot of fun and ended up giving us the freshest fish possible. It took both of us a while to catch our fish, there were a ton in the tank, which sits below a fake boat that houses most of the tables, but none seemed interested. We tried moving the bait right in front of them, letting it sink and completely ignoring them, we even tried the patented Hanson fish call that my Dad taught me but nothing was working. Finally I tried a small bouncing method that seemed to garner a lot of attention and caught the first of our two meals.

I may have been slightly drunk

After you catch the fish they ask how you would like it prepared, I figured I'd like it to be as fresh as possible so I went with raw sashimi. While they prepared mine Chrissy tried frantically to get her fish to no avail. Finally I took a turn and got one in a couple of minutes. Chrissy, having had quite a lot of raw fish over the last couple of weeks, decided to go for deep fried.

Something that I had read about in the reviews but still was a little unprepared for was that they don't just serve you the edible portion of the fish, oh no no, they let it sit there and judge you for what you've done to it.

Luckily it took us so long to get the second fish that by the time I made it back to the table the fish wasn't twitching as I had heard was very common. It ended up being a bit expensive but in the end a very unique and very Japanese experience for the both of us.