Tokyo and Onsen - Day 2
Made my way to the fish market in Tokyo, left the house at 440am but didn't feel tired at all! Having someone to be accountable to that was waiting for me definitely helped. Unfortunately, my new friend Yuto didn't make it...
I made friends on the way to the market with some other tourists from Austria and Germany that were also heading to the market. It was nice to walk around with some other friendly people. I'm always intrigued by how quickly I'm able to meet people when I'm travelling on my own and making a conscious effort to reach out. It's surprisingly easy... This is an approach to day by day life I'd like to take on more when I'm at home. It seems that we always have a planned events and a schedule that keep us from making last minute changes, but really, there is no reason that I can't change my plans completely to spend some time with a new person. In the pick-up world, this is called an "instant date" and it is the perfect way to build a relationship quickly. You do something spontaneous and are quickly able to tell if someone is worth spending more time with in the future.
In talking with one of the girls from Austria I started to get the "what am I doing with my life" feeling. She works in avalanche research half the year and has been working at a ski town in Japan for the other half of the year. Whenever I meet people that are living a ski life I always get jealous and feel like they are living the life that I want to be living. I start to think about the logistics of what it would take for me to do something similar and two thoughts come up that hold me back. Firstly, I feel like I need to be saving up for retirement at all times. If I'm not saving up for retirement I feel like I'm doing something wrong. The other thought that comes up is that if I quit my job to do something like this, I will never get hired for another job ever again. Both of these feelings seem illogical, but it seems like I've had a conservative life approach ingrained in me that I can't get over. I can't figure out if this is objectively right or wrong...
The fish market was nothing I expected. There is an opening scene in the movie "Free Willy" where Jesse rides his bike through the Pike Place fish market in Seattle. I expected it to look like that. The market was on a much more industrial scale though. There were skid steer cruising around every where and people loading up trucks left and right. We missed the morning auction that happens just past 5am. Apparently people get in line at 3am to get in for the auction, as they only let in 120 people everyday.
There are restaurants in the fish market that serve sushi and sashimi, and it was totally worth going for that. The tuna and salmon were so tender and soft... They almost melted in my mouth. There was absolutely no fishy taste, and the rice itself was amazing too!
After getting a bit lost heading home, and stopping to get an ice cold canned coffee from a vending machine (that ended up being hot), I made my way back to my hostel for a quick nap. I grabbed all my ski gear and made my way for Ueno station to catch a train and bus for Ilyamo and Onsen respectively. The train took 1.5 hours and I was at my hostel by 4pm. After an in-depth overview of the town map showing all the awesome hole in the wall restaurants and onsen's (there are 13 different free "onsen's", which are natural hot-springs), I went out for some Sushi, which was again, amazing.
My jet-lag finally caught up to me, so I ended up watching a couple of episodes of the office and passing out by 9pm!