Charles Town Chatter: Hunter's Great Adventure Part I

Narita adventure

We arrive in Tokyo in great shape after a 14-hour flight that was pure bliss. For those of you who have not traveled with an Asian airline in a while, you should. We were in Business Class thanks to my hundreds of thousands of miles, and it was worth every mile. From the minute we entered the aircraft until we departed we were treated as honored guest. The plane was immaculate, the service impeccable and the wines delicious. We managed to sleep for seven of the 14 hours and the rest of the time was spent watching great movies and eating lovely Japanese food. We think that because we were traveling with Hunter, we got special attention.

For those of you who have not as yet met Hunter, he is a charmer, and everyone loves him. He is the mascot of our daughter Valley’s class and the students asked us to take him with us on our trip to New Zealand. He has certainly made a difference in our travels and he is a wise and witty little bear.

Once we arrived in Tokyo we went right to our hotel, which is very near the airport and we managed to take a long walk to shake off jetlag. This was followed by a few happy hour delights and dinner in our room, courtesy of the Family Market where we purchased cup of noodles (nothing like you have ever had before) and some sushi and sashimi. We were in bed by 9pm local and slept very well until 7am the next morning. We walked and ran and did lots of healthy things before having coffee and cleaning up for our big adventure.

We took the hotel shuttle bus to the main part of the city of Narita and then walked to the famous temple. It’s actually a complex of temples built on a hill, with lovely trees and flowers and stonework all around. There was an outdoor concert going on – three women plucking some sort of horizontal harp, and several men playing recorders. I noticed that their music was NOT western notation, and they turned the pages from right to left. Interesting.

By this time we’d worked up a hunger so as we headed back toward the bus stop we read lots of menus and narrowed it down to the few that had the most English. We wouldn’t do that in Europe, but when the alphabet is such a challenge there’s not much hope, even with pictures! So we opened the door to a place advertising garlic ramen soup and found ourselves in a very hot square room about 15’ by 15’ with a Teppanyaki grill in the middle, narrow counters and cupboards along the two far walls, and seating for only 10 people along two counters facing the grill on two sides. It appeared to be a man and his daughter in charge, and even though the room was hot we stayed – and we were so glad we did. The food was delicious and it was such fun to watch it being made. The man cut up at least 8 large cloves of garlic for Wm’s ramen soup – which he grilled for quite awhile, and also grilled a few slices of pork and then put it all into a large bowl with a hard boiled egg, ginger shoots, and lots of noodles. I ordered okonomiyaki - a cabbage pancake (my choice with squid), which was a tasty mixture of beaten eggs, finely chopped cabbage, and other vegetables that he formed into a thick pancake and grilled. When it was cooked he ‘painted’ it with a dark mixture like a Teriyaki glaze and then added thin stripes of something like mayonnaise to make it pretty. It was delicious.