View of Pudong from Bar Rouge’s terrace on The Bund.

View of The Bund from Pudong.

The Shanghai World Financial Center and Jin Mao Tower peek through buildings in Pudong.

Up at the Cloud 9 bar on the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower, there are spectacular views of Pudong and The Bund.

Downstairs and outside, looking back up at the Jin Mao Tower and Shanghai World Financial Center.

The last time I was in Tokyo, I had a completely transcendent experience with tonkatsu. It was so good, I haven’t been able to look at tonkatsu the same way since. This time, it was a mind-blowing experience with tempura. We hit a tempura restaurant in Ginza and ponied up to the bar downstairs. It was us, the chef, and more tempura-able ingredients than you could shake a stick at. Even the special dipping salts and seasonings were amazing. Here I am taking on shrimp on a stick.

I’m not a fan of curry, but I haven’t experience Japanese curry before. It was sweeter and lighter than your typical south Asian variety, and added to tonkatsu, rice, and a scrambled egg…heaven.

Some interesting signs spotted around Tokyo.

I’m not quite sure what precipitated this, but this is an ad campaign found throughout the Tokyo Metro system. I guess one too many people were winding up with wet umbrellas.

Over at the Senso-ji temple, an amusing sign reiterates that pigeons can indeed get food by themselves.

There was noticeably less smoking in Tokyo compared with a few years ago. One of the reasons seems to be this anti-smoking campaign found on sidewalks everywhere. Rather than smoking while walking, there seem to be designated smoking spots on streets.

Before I pass out for the night, here are a few images of Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood by night.

Just up the street from the hotel is the Kabuki-za Theater that, just as it sounds, hosts kabuki performances.

A few minutes north in the heart of Ginza is Chuo-dori (Chuo Street) where all the big-time department stores and brands have storefronts. These two photos were taken from the middle of the shopping madness near the Ginza subway exit. The first one is looking southwest

and this one is looking northeast.

After the unfortunately fierce bout of jet lag this morning, I made my way over to the Tsukiji Central Fish Market to get a piece of the organized chaos. It’s a sight to behold: seafood of all shapes and sizes is on the block in narrow stalls as little motorized carts tear through the maze of people and stalls to get everything where it needs to go.

The bounty for emerging unscathed was sushi breakfast. It doesn’t get fresher than this, assuming that you don’t want your food moving. And I don’t. There were absolutely insane lines outside of two of the shops. I overheard guys near the front of the line saying they were waiting about an hour already.

The restaurants aren’t much more than very narrow counters seating maybe a dozen people at a time. Even if every diner ate as quickly as they could and got out, there was just no way to get good turnover.

After toughing out the lines for maybe 20 minutes and not really getting anywhere, we threw in the towel and hit up a less-trafficked restaurant, named Yamazaki, between the two insanely popular ones. You know what? It was damn fine sushi to me. I’m sure there’s a little extra something in the other two super-popular places, but I’m not enough of a sushi connoisseur to know what I was missing. Here’s the plate that I took on.

…and I’m awake. Not all that surprising given that it’s around 1:00pm in California…yesterday. Ah, the joys of flying to the other side of the planet and crossing the date line. The flight was okay given that I didn’t have to go cattle-class (thank you, Dolby), but the number of things that were broken on that United 747 was a bit disturbing. One bathroom out of commission, in-seat power broken, air map not working, video screen flickering, thermostat not telling the truth, the list goes on. I should probably just be glad we made it in one piece!

The quest for Qoo got started in the half day that I’ve been here. I still haven’t seen the addictive kiddie drink in any of the omnipresent vending machines, but that doesn’t stop grocery stores from rockin’ the 1.5 liter variety!

Too bad it’s slated to rain all day today since we have a spare day before hunkering down in the Dolby Tokyo office. I’ll figure out a way to make the best of it.