Day 2 - the elusive pork-free ramen bowl...

Despite having sampled some tasty Tokyo food so far, Sofia wasn't eating much, and we were also feeling a bit peckish. We looked for some place with a breakfast buffet and ended up at Denny's. But this was no American Denny's - it was sleeker and cleaner, more like a Panera's in decor. We got Sofia pancakes (served in the shape of a Mickey Mouse with cocoa puffs for eyes and a giant blot of ice cream for a nose), had French toast (with regular sugar instead of powdered), lots of coffee, and eggs to get us started. It was Sunday, so our mission was to head to Harajuku, the neighborhood in central Tokyo where teenagers in outrageous fashions parade about, setting trends later adopted by rock stars like Gwen Stefani. The whole business is termed "cosplay," as in "costume play."

We took the Yamanote train loop to Harajuku, which was, like everything else we'd seen so far, absolutely packed with people. Because of the crowds we opted to carry Sofia that day in a sling, which was fine for awhile but gradually got exhausting. We saw a few teenagers dressed in punk gear near the station and then walked through the heavily forested paths of Yoyogi park, where we ended up at the Meiji shrine, a monument to former rulers of Japan, but saw no more crazily dressed teenagers. Coming out of the park we found a square where Japanese men who long to have been born in 1950s America dance to rockabilly music and drink beer. Eventually we asked enough people and were directed toward harajuku street, which Nour pointed out was much like being in a Moroccan medina on a crowded market day. So unbelievably crowded, with lots of neon boutiques and noodle shops and bars, but all sort of cute and sanitized.

We walked for awhile then had had enough, so we headed out on our second quest, to find a place I'd read about on a website dedicated to ramen noodles in Tokyo. This place supposedly served one of the best bowls of chicken ramen, which is not the standard way of serving ramen, which is frequently made with pork. It was in a neighborhood called Oimachi, and once we got off the subway we wandered around in the cold trying to find the place based on the way various landmarks had looked on Google Earth from our hotel room. Once we found it, we had to wait until it opened at 6, so there was more wandering about in the cold until this hour came.

At the ramen shops, you choose your bowl from a vending machine, pay the machine, then hand your ticket to the chef and sit up at a little bar waiting for the food. This is standard for Japanese fast food (see picture, below, from a different place - the irony here is the title - "homemade curry"). The ramen bowl was OK but a little gamey - very fatty chicken. A little disappointed, we headed back to the hotel. Tokyo is huge, so even little tasks like this take hours.