Wandering Around Piccadilly Circus

 Food, Great Britain, Japanese Language, Travel  Comments Off on Wandering Around Piccadilly Circus
Jul 052011
 

My first stop today was Piccadilly Circus, where there’s a neat used Japanese book store called Adanami. It’s in an old dry cleaner’s, and when I got there, I could still see the old dry cleaner’s sign.

I got there just a little too early, because they were still closed. They open at noon, and it was still 11:45.

So I headed down the street to kill some time, and found the Vintage Magazine Store, and looked around in there. I checked out their vintage magazines in the basement. They have a nice collection, but it’s all on the expensive side. I was scouting it out for my brother-in-law, who often uses old magazines as references for his graphic design work.

Upstairs, they had an interesting selection of post cards and birthday cards, as well as movie-related novelties. I got some funny birthday cards, so it was a success.

Then I went back to Adanami to search for used Japanese books. The prices there were pretty good for the most part, but I didn’t have a whole lot of luck finding the books that I wanted. I was interested in finding some books on 国語 (sort of like Language Arts for Japanese), but didn’t find anything that struck my fancy. I did find a copy of Harry Potter. It was a bit pricey for a used copy, but it’s getting harder to find it in Japanese.

FYI– no credit card accepted there. Bring cash. They also have a karaoke box in the back, if that’s your thing.

Bulgogiiii

After that, I headed to a Korean restaurant in the neighborhood called Soju, and had a really good bulgogi lunch set meal. Bulgogi is a Korean dish of marinated beef that’s been grilled. I got some kimchi along with it, as well as some pickled mung bean sprouts and rice.

Considering how paranoid everyone is about bean sprouts and other salad ingredients in Europe these days, I ate them without really considering it. Oops.

The only downside was that the chopsticks were metal and kind of thin, so it was hard getting them to work. I’m much better at using wooden chopsticks than plastic or metal. A spoon came with the chopsticks, but there was no way I was going to wimp out and use the spoon.

Mitsukoshi and Japan Centre… Again!

After lunch, I headed back towards the station, and then towards Mitsukoshi‘s basement, where the books are. I wanted to have a good look over them before I headed out, because I can’t look over them at home. They have a really good selection on Japanese learning, even though they’re all pretty expensive. If nothing else, you can check them out and then buy online from someplace like BK1 Honto. I found a really good book on business Japanese that I haven’t seen anywhere else, so I decided to take the hit and buy it. ( £36. Ouch!)

Then it was over to Japan Centre again to look at their books and to see if they had anything else interesting, but nothing really jumped out at me.

They didn’t even have Men’s Pocky.

I headed back to the hotel to rest for a bit and to pack my books to send home tomorrow. Box wrestling, commence!

Showers? More Like a Fire Hose!

Packages packed, this evening was my first encounter with the rain in England. And rain it did, violently hard.

My Gore-Tex jacket was barely able to keep me dry, and my nylon hiking pants were getting soaked fast. So I dashed into Boots‘, and stared at umbrellas for about 15 minutes. I figured that it wouldn’t really matter which one I picked, because they would all kind of suck, so I got the most compact one for 10 pounds, and sure enough, it sucked. It barely covered my head and made sure I got completely soaked.

Then it was off to Tokyo Spicy, for a katsudon. They make an awesome katsudon.

Crossed Up at King’s Cross

 Food, Great Britain, Japanese Language, Travel  Comments Off on Crossed Up at King’s Cross
Jul 012011
 

I met up with Michele (pronounced the men’s way, not the women’s way) from Italy today. He’s someone who also posts on the RTK forums, and is really good at Japanese. He’s in town to take the JLPT N1. We had a bit of a mess at first trying to meet up.

We agreed to meet at Kings Cross/Saint Pancras, since that’s the neighborhood where the test is going to take place on Sunday. What neither one of us realized was that there are two national railway stations there: one is called King’s Cross, and one is called Saint Pancras. (Hence the “/” in the name.)

So when I asked him where he was, he said he was in front of the Starbuck’s in the station. That’s odd, I didn’t see a Starbuck’s. But I did see a Burger King. Well, he didn’t see a Burger King at all. So I moved to the wicket in front of platform 2, and he agreed to move in that general direction, thinking that maybe we were just on different floors. We even tried waving. After 10 minutes or so, we finally broke down and started asking around for ideas. Then we found out why we couldn’t see each other.

No, we weren’t in parallel universes, although that would have been far more interesting.

He was in Saint Pancras railway station, and I was in King’s Cross railway station. One is right next to the other.

See? Parallel universes would have been more interesting!

Mitsukoshi and Japan Centre

After finally meeting up, we headed over to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) campus of the University of London at Vernon Rise, where Sunday’s test will be. It wasn’t too hard to find.

Then it was off to Piccadilly Circus and Mitsukoshi for lunch. Yes, that’s the same Mitsukoshi that’s a famous department store chain in Japan.

Mitsukoshi has a nice restaurant. The food presentation is very attractive, and very standard Japanese. I get the feeling that the intention is to make Japanese tourists feel like they’re “home,” more than it is to bring a taste of Japan to London.

I had the steamed vegetable and sashimi set meal for £14, and that was one of the cheaper ones. It was very good, but not cheap.

After lunch, we did some browsing around Mitsukoshi’s book shop. What’s interesting about Mitsukoshi is that they don’t really sell a lot of “Japanese stuff,” instead they sell a ton of English souvenirs to Japanese tourists.

Again, it’s the whole, “Hey, if you’re Japanese, then this is a store that caters to you” vibe. It was kind of disappointing, really. They had a good book store, but the prices were hideous. It was yet another case of, “Don’t you mean dollars instead of pounds?” A lot of cheap books, 1800 yen books, were going for £35.

Yikes.

After being scared away by the expensive books, we headed over to the Japan Centre, to look at their smaller selection of books. Japan Centre is neat, because they actually have Japanese products.

The downside, again, are some crazy high prices. Also, their book selection is much smaller than Mitsukoshi’s, and the prices aren’t much better.

The upside of Japan Centre is that it has a lot of Japanese products, like food and other things. It also has a restaurant that I’ll have to try later.

We looked around a bit more, and then headed back to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, and called it a day.

I headed back to the room, crashed for a bit, studied some, then headed off to Nando’s, a Portugese-style chicken chain. That’s some good chicken. The store is a little chaotic, but the chicken is tasty. It’s in some kind of sauce, but it’s delicious. The downside is that it’s not too cheap. £9 ($14?) for a meal.

Welcome to London. Empty your wallets, please.

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