As “usual”, visiting Japan is a culture choc (in a most positive sense!), and this time as my first visit to Tokyo was no exception. Despite a rather heavy travel schedule to the Japanese (pre)-Alps, and five different housings!, everything took place as planed, albeit sometimes stressful. (To the point I fainted in a ramen restaurant the first day, presumably due to a combination of no sleep and no food for the past 24h. The ramen were fabulous, by the way!) One striking feature, related to the above, is the overall efficiency in daily life organisation, reflected a myriad of little details, as discovered in rental places. (With the correlated drawback of an abuse of plastic layers (bags-within-bags) and very limited recycling (despite the mottainai culture).)
Unsurprisingly, I had fantastic food throughout, mostly in backstreet tiny places with a few seats and a limited menu for much less than a duh meal in Paris (as last Saturday near Luxembourg!), e.g., fresh soba noodles in Takayama! (an almost empty place spotted by the Michelin guide and with no cell phone reception as an extra incentive to savour the instant), many more kinds of tofu than I knew existed—including a tofu okonomiyaki—, another opportunity to taste a kuzu dessert (above), limitless hojicha as default tea, a tea ceremony that involved a long chat with the tea shop owners in Takayama despite the language barrier, two traditional meals in traditional (gossen) farm in Shiragawa-go—where I went running by -6⁰ on clean roads with snow pile-ups higher than me on in side, before rerunning in Ueno park with morning joggers and the promise of cherry blossoms the following week!—, as well as drinking massive amounts of (non-traditional) matcha late (!) [despite the shortage of Uji matcha] and a few Japanese style coffees.
We also (re)experienced the efficiency of transportation, from the fabulous Tokyo metro network to the Shinkansen, whose far-from-new interior reminded me that they were introduced twenty years before the French TGVs (but updated to get USB connections on every seat), with the Snowpiercer feeling of rushing at high speed between row of high-rises (and managing to catch it literally at the last minute in Nagoya, due to a late (!!) connection from the mountain line from Takayama. And enjoying the limitless offer of meal boxes at Tokyo Central.
The flights between Paris and Tokyo were a bit lengthy, due to the Russian flight exclusion zone, meaning our inward plane followed the Russian border through all central Asia former USSR republics on the way to Tokyo, and the outward plane continued East to cross the Behring strait, with great views of Northern Alaska and Greenland. Which partly made up for the length!
