Getting There - A Stop in Tokyo

Travel like this tests your sense of time. Later today, the class will converge in Hanoi, coming in from multiple cities, at all different times. Having left Boston myself yesterday at about 8am, I seem to have lost Thursday night along the way, arriving in Tokyo on Friday afternoon with 3 classmates, Sekou, Behzad, and John. While Tokyo is not exactly on the way to Hanoi, it is if you are trying to get to Asia on frequent flyer miles, and especially worth the diversion if you get to fly Business Class, which was a vacation in itself.

With only one night in town, we headed over to the Roppongi District, a strip of bars and restaurants. There are barkers in front of most clubs, hoping to entice you into their establishment. Sekou was attracting barkers like flies, so that it was hard to make much progress moving down the street. This is of course because Sekou is very polite and wanted to allow each gentleman the opportunity to describe their products.

The best part of the evening was discovering a sushi restaurant called Gattan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkbr5EvSFfY.

I could not tell you how to find it, except that it is below an Outback Steakhouse. All four of us agreed that is was some of the best sushi we had ever had because the rice was different that we get in the US, served warm and softer in texture. The slabs fish were both thick and fresh - there were multiple grades of "fatty" for the tuna, cut in thick, large sashimi slabs.

It is 4am, and time to start thinking about the next leg of the trip.

Written by: Katherine Faulkner