Japan Day 12

We started off our latest ever by meeting with Marina for breakfast. We ate at the hotel coffee shop like we had been for our stay but Marina joined us. Since she starts at 9 we met downstairs then. From there she gave us some ideas of some things we could do in our last couple days here. We ended up chatting with her for a while so we got out for a late start out of the hotel.
We visited Asakusa one more time to do some of the touristy shopping we had to do before we leave. This took up the earlier part of the afternoon. We found a restaurant to eat there and Brien and I had a dish made up of beef cheek. We asked if that literally was what it was and the waitress said yes. She called it beef choke but she pointed to her cheek. In any event it was not fully what I was expected. It was a stew where the meat was cooked for a while so even though it was probably tougher meat it was fairly tender. There were large streaks of fat in it which were interesting to contend with as I am not the biggest fan of fat when eating. In any event the taste was good but the sauce from the nabe, which is a stew, was very spicy for Brien. It had a reasonable amount of lingering pepper that I sort of liked but Brien was a trooper and made his way through it. Fortunately the rice was bowled separately as they normally do so he had something not spicy to eat as well.

After Asakusa we returned to the hotel and regrouped for a while to wait for George’s coworker Hans to show up. He showed up in the early evening and we took a cab to Shibuya where we went to a restaurant that Hans really liked. He ordered us a bunch of dishes and we liked them. Amongst them was horse meat sashimi, which was literally raw horse meat. It was very good and surprisingly tender. It tasted a lot like beef. In any event I would eat horse again. The food was coming out fast and furious and there was a lot of it. I missed taking pictures of most of it unfortunately. We stayed there and had a few drinks, the most we have had since we’ve been here and then returned to the hotel to get some sleep.