Day 2: Tokyo Station / Ueno / Shinjuku

Continuing on my Tokyo Travelogue blog series, the itinerary I planned for our second day in Tokyo took us to a ramen eating feast at Tokyo Station, some sneaker shopping at Ueno and then our very first earthquake experience in Shinjuku while eating a really good Tonkatsu!

RAMEN STREET

The husband has this crazy obsession with ramen. What better place to get good ramen than at Ramen street. It’s a street filled with the top 10 ramen brands in Japan.

Personally I love the Tsukemen by Rokurinsha. <3 The noodles are served springy and cold, and when you dip that in the warm, thick broth, it’s heaven.

After Peter had 2 bowls of ramen (can’t remember which one and Rokurinsha), and I had 1/2 (Rokurinsha) a bowl, we were too full to eat anymore. After walking along character street (where I found Jigglypuff in Pokemon shop!), we proceeded to Ueno.

SNEAKER SHOPPING AT UENO

This is the first time we’ve been to Ueno and I’m really glad we did. I enjoyed walking the streets of Ueno, looking at the food stalls, fashion stalls and so on.

Do check out sneakers here. They have quite a lot of shoe shops here. And it was here I was introduced to Palladium Shoes and love the lime green pair I bought! I wanted the light green pair instead but they didn’t have any in my size ;( There were a lot of popular sneaker brands in baby sizes. We bought Daniel a classic New Balance here.

I love my new palladiums – they are extremely comfy.

Ueno took up a lot of time. Half a day I reckon. Then we went back to Shinjuku for dinner.

90 YEARS OLD TONKATSU PLACE

Again this was a recommendation from the guidebook. This 90 year old little shop lot near Isetan (at the backlane opposite Uniqlo) sells some yummy pork tonkatsu that is fried to a crisp.

王ろじ
3 Chome-17-21 Shinjuku Tokyo 160-0022
Contact: +81 3-3352-1037

The meat were not the tough type that I usually end up eating in Singapore but it was very soft and delicious. They only 3 items on their menu: pork cutlet with curry, pork cutlet and prawn. We each took the pork cutlet with curry and pork cutlet. It was very good and satisfying! A great break from the massive amounts of sushi and sashimi that we have been eating!

Halfway through our meal, we experienced our first major earthquake at 5.6 magnitude. We literally felt like someone physically moved us for that 1 second! We looked to the locals to see what to do next and they calmly switched on the tv to watch the news. It was no biggie it seems. Everybody continued eating calmly and watching tv.

DON DON DONKI

I popped by some of those tax free stores to get the much raved about foot patch by LION. I wondered why so many people bought this so I went to google and found that this patch is recommended by 女人我最大。Ah, no wonder. I got myself some to try. They were a lot cheaper in Japan than if I bought it in Singapore!