Oct 13, 2007, Tsukiji Fish Market (築地市場)

This is probably the day I woke up the earliest in this year...to go to Tsukiji fish market. The tsukiji fish market is known as one of the world's largest fish market. This means that it is definitely the Japan's largest. I woke up at 4:30am, and headed to the station with Loic. It took us approximately an hour and half to tsukiji shijoo (築地市場) station. We met Junko there, and started our journey through the early morning market with fishy smell and half-closed eyes.

The morning is the busiest time for merchants and fish traders in the market. I was able to see a lot of those scooter-like trucks with fish boxes piled at the back. Despite the fact that the fish market is one of the famous attractions for tourists, at least it seemed to me that those merchants have no interests in tourists nor were they willing to accomodate tourists while doing their business. We basically had to find our own best to avoid those trucks and interfering their business. Below are the couple of more shots.

If we just looked around the tsukiji fish market for an hour and "yeah, so waking this early like 4am to come all the way to tsukiji market and having a look around for an hour was totally worth it and pays off". Hell no. I heard that there is a sushi place where they make sushi right out of the fish freshly caught in the morning same day, and I heard it's damn good..! So why not trying it. My friend (Thanks to Siwan) recommended a place called Sushi-dai (寿司大) and we found it after searching through the side street next to the market. Here the problem arose. The lineup for that restaurant was just so long that we had to wait for several hours to enter the restaurant. I was really surprised to see that a lot of people are willing to wait for hours for good food. Well, the long lineup looks it gotta be a really awesome place, so Junko and I were totally up for joining this line, except Loic looked somewhat reluctant to join us to be a long-time-waiting-for-sushi warrior. He lined up with us eventually, but I had to bear with him whining and complaining that this sushi gotta be really good. :P
Well, sushi were indeed REALLY good. we ended up waiting two hours and half, and finally entered the restaurant. I ordered more than 3000 yen-worth sushi set by myself. Bearing the eyes from starving people waiting outside, the sushi were really fresh and almost melted in my mouth. I took some shots at sushi before they all went into my stomach.

This sushi meal was supposed to be our breakfast. But, because we spent almost 3 hours on waiting, this turned out to be our lunch when we entered the restaurant. Having our stomach filled up with freshly made sushi, I was happy to leave the tsukiji market and move to our next destination. Junko led us to different temples nearby the tsukiji market. We looked them around, walked, finally reached Roppongi(六本木). Not that we did anything crazy there, but had hamburgers with maguro wasabi taste with tofu nuggets and soybean latte. Sounds pretty much Japanalized hamburger set, doesn't it. :)
I am including some pictures I took after Tsukiji market.