Triscribe

Everything around begins with “shin” (“new”) nowadays. The bullet train is called shin-kansen. The neighborhood we are at is called Shinjuku. And today we went to Shin-Yokahama, a western suburb of Tokyo, where we spent the day at Chinatown, the waterfront and the Shinyokahama Ramen Museum, a monument to a national staple. Unlike other museums, it is entirely interactive: you are brought back to a train station town of the 1950′s where there are 8 fully operating ramen restaurants, real branches of real ramen restaurants from around the country. In two sittings (thanks for the free multiple reentries), I polished off 5 bowls of extraordinary ramen. I was kind of hurting afterwards, but it was well worth it. At Chinatown, found mostly kitch, but also saw Henchinrou, the restaurant that beat Iron Chef Chen after 3 tries.

More fish market tomorrow.