The travels of Nick and Adelaide have begun!
Throughout the next year we will be posting about all of our misadventures in this foreign land know as Asia.
The journey from Sun Valley to Bali was anything but boring. 5 airports, 4 sub-par airplane meals, 20 hours of layovers, and two very tired but excited travelers. We arrived at the tokyo airport at midnight with a 14 hour Layover ahead of us. We caught the last Monorail into the city. Changing trains at random, following the ebb and flow of humanity. where we ended up I may never know. By this point we were going on 24 hours with no sleep. a blur of florescent lights. Men in suits. clean sidewalks and highrise buildings twinkling like the stars above. It was 2am and still the streets where teeming with people. we stumbled through the crowds with wide eyes and delirious minds. Following our noses, we found ourselves seated at this back alley noodle bar. 6 seats total. this ancient Japanese man slanging soup into the wee hours of the morning. Oh and that heavenly udon. It was like an elixir of life for these two travelers. I'm only sorry that I was too out of it to get a picture of this little soup oasis in the darkest part of the Tokyo night.
With hot soup in our bellies, we hunted for a taxi. Surprisingly at 3am there are very few taxi drivers who speak English in Tokyo and thus we were turned away time and time again. We knew we wanted to go to this legendary tuna auction, but didn't know how to say it in Japanese or where it was, or where we were for that matter. Finally nick, through a great amount of charades, found us a taxi and we were off.
Much to our surprise, the driver brought us to the fish market, already a buzz with activity. It was 3am and we found there was a small line formed of diehard tuna efficiantos. By 4am over 120 people had arrived and those who didn't make the cut off were turned away. We were ushered into a small windowless room, packed together like sardines. Finally at 530am our wait was over and we were ushered into the auction. At the auction we ran into Mark Zuckerburg (a recent Enoteca customer), who consequently ended up at the same sushi restaurant we did two hours later. Did he follow us from Idaho?
The auction was fast and fun. The sushi afterward was nothing short of perfection. Then as the first rays of sunshine hit the tokyo streets we made our way back to the airport. We were pretty proud of ourselves on the way back. Despite our transportation confusion only hours before we navigated back to the airport like locals.
The craziest part was from the time we left LAX to the time we saw those morning sun rays we had spent over 20 hours in darkness, in a perpetual night. They always say its darkest before the dawn. And so our adventures had begun.
Tokyo, we will meet again.