Grady in Tokyo

This blog post is coming live from Tokyo...exactly 14 hours ahead of Starkville time. So, when you read this, it is much like looking into the future.

The airport I flew into (Narita) is about 40 miles east of downtown. It was actually quite rural. In fact, it reminded me of flying into Birmingham's airport with lots of very green trees, a few hills, and some small areas of agriculture. However, after a 2+ hour bus ride, I arrived in an area more like I was expecting.

This is the view from my hotel window...30th floor at the Tokyo Hilton.

Due to the constant risk of earthquakes, there are just a few places with lots of highrise buildings. This is actually what most of Tokyo looks like...lots of medium-sized buildings, very close together.

This is less than a 10-minute walk from my hotel. This is the busiest part of the city, and it is compared to Times Square in New York. This is adjacent to Shinjuku Station (the busiest train station in the world with over 2 million passengers per day). We have spent a good bit of our time just walking around this area looking for interesting bars and restaurants.

This is where we ate tonight. Looks like some pretty good meats on sticks, right? Well, it was actually pretty tasty, but the image below explains what we were eating.

Don't let his expression fool you...Balling was really excited about this place. We chose the following items: skin, cartilage (sic), intestines, heart, meat of head (our favorite menu item), and pig nose (or "rose" as they have it listed). Not sure what animals some of these come from, and we really were not sure which was which. We think we figured out which was skin and which was heart. The really fatty piece was likely the pig nose/rose, but the rest all seemed to blend together. None of them were terrible, but I was not asking for any recipes on the way out.

Konichiwa!