TacoCat’s Travels #136 (Japan 6.0): Snacks, Shrines and Shopping! 😋

Hey Hive!

So if you missed the last couple of posts, we're currently on another journey to Japan after we finished our final semester of college back in January 2019! And it was coincidentally around Valentines' Day too! We initially talked about wanting to visit South Korea but a Delta Airlines deal kinda changed our plans so.. to Tokyo once again!

But this time we were staying somewhat outside Tokyo in an area called Omorimachi. And last week, after we were done visiting the Cup Noodle Museum in Yokohama, we went to the nearby amusement park called Cosmo World and rode an interesting roller coaster, before going to Kawasaki for some dinner!

19 February 2019. Tuesday.

We had a pretty late start after so much walking around the museum the previous day. But we didn't really have plans for today other than meeting a friend at night, so we just took a stroll in search of some lunch to eat.

I was in the mood for some warm soup since it was pretty cold and dreary out. And on searching Google, we found a hidden gem in the form of Kitakata Bannai Ramen!

This was a ramen chain we found in Tokyo quite a while back when we went there for a summer exchange program with Keio University in 2016! 

We were so impressed with Kitakata Bannai last time we ate there, precisely because of the amount of chashu they have in their ramen! The ramen itself is slightly above average compared to others we've had, but the chashu is definitely the most impressive. And they also have a very nice broiled chashu rice bowl that is absolutely delicious!

Here's their menu!

I'd normally get their set meal of Kitakata ramen, the broiled chashu pork rice and boiled eggs, but I wasn't super hungry at the time and I was curious about their wontons so I ordered the chashu wonton noodles instead, while Sean just got the set meal instead. We were served our noodles first.

After a little bit, the rest of Sean's sides arrived, and he even got a bowl of rice to boot!

Because we took this photo when we first ate Kitakata Bannai ramen; just to show how much chashu there was, it soon became a tradition to take ramen photos like this.

So this was mine:

And this was Sean's:

I was suuuper stuffed after finishing that bowl of ramen so after that we went to take a walk and found this neat little shrine near the restaurant!

The stairs were kinda steep going up, but the top was a simple, traditional-looking shrine.

These were the stairs and they were actually pretty tall stairs which made them steeper than usual.

We tried to be respectful so we didn't walk around here too much and didn't touch anything.

Thankfully there were handlebars going down the stairs because the stairs were also a little bit uneven and I was scared of slipping and falling.

After visiting the shrine, we looked up Google to see where else we could go and we found a Mega Donki Hote not too far away! Donki Hote is a variety discount store that sells a whole assortment of products ranging from food to household goods. It's one of our favourite stores of all time and we always make it a point to stop by for snacks and drinks.

But this Mega Donki definitely takes the cake for being one of the biggest outlets we've ever been to! Truly "Mega" indeed.

And I'm not sure when this started, but I like taking photos of Sean in supermarkets. There's just something about the slightly asymmetrical aisles of foodstuff that make it cool to photograph I guess.

The Donki Hote outlets are mostly standalone buildings, and each floor is a different department/category of items. So there are whole floors dedicated to food and even clothes and costumes! So you just knew what we had to do.

There were even some video game stuff and they had an old Famicom system hooked up with Super Mario! So I played a couple of levels.

We had fun exploring and looking at all the stuff in Donki and the interior itself was nicely decorated too with this faux rose arch.

There was also a huge standalone Uniqlo just beside the Mega Donki so we went to check it out too!

I don't know if clothing shops have the similar effect but the lights made this shot look cool I guess.

I don't think we actually bought anything though, we were just sipping on this sakura flavoured pepsi that we got from Donki. It tasted a little weird though; I wasn't really a fan.

The uniqlo had 2 floors; 1 for men and kids, and the other was for women.And of course the women sections was huuuge.

After that we went to choco cro, one of our favourite cafes for some snacks before meeting our friend for dinner!

We bought a heart-shaped sugar biscuit thing, and our usual chocolate croissant. The heart-shaped butter biscuit was pretty alright, and the chocolate croissant was yummy as usual of course.

After that our friend finally made it and we went to have barbecue at one of our favourite barbecue places - Gyu-Kaku!

Our friend, Dean, has never eaten at this place before so we decided to show him how awesome it is.

I've written about Gyu-Kaku a couple of years ago but basically you order different cuts of meat and grill it yourself!

We tried different types of cuts and Dean also ordered the fondue and they gave us cold cheese to put on top of the fire to melt and dip in.

For dessert, Dean ordered something like a melon pan but if was soft so he put it on the grill for a bit and we ended up chatting and forgetting about it and err.. it turned out burnt. welp.

He still tried to eat it as much as he could though, to be fair.

Our happy and slightly sweaty faces after a yummy, meaty meal!

After that we stopped by Donki again to grab some snacks and drinks! Dean was gonna stay at our place to game and chill for the night so we went to get some supplies to fuel us as we played games!

I don't have many pictures from that since we were busy playing and having fun but what an awesome time! We did get some sleep in the end though since we had something special planned the next day. Tune in next week for that!

But here's a teaser:

Thanks so much for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!

TacoCat’s Travels #135 (Japan 6.0): Diving into Cosmo World! 🎡

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