Narita - More than an Airport

A Japanese Pause
We carved our Tucson trip into three easy-to-digest slices, the first being an eight hour layover in Tokyo.  Well, not exactly Tokyo but the town whose namesake, Narita, has been subsumed by the airport.  We stored our carry on luggage at the arrival terminal, something still possible in Japan, and took the train one stop into town.  It was cold, in the upper forties, but there was little breeze in the narrow lanes. Many of the small stores were just opening for the day, the shop keepers placing their wares along the sidewalks.  Narita is known for two specialties: traditional rice crackers and barbecued eel.

We'd taken the red eye from Singapore and landed at 9am.  I'd managed a few hours of sleep angled in my seat like a lower-case h and the morning chill wasn't helping me to straighten out.  As usual, the Dodo bounded ahead of me popping in and out of shops, searching for eats.  When she's hungry she gets tunnel vision, her world narrows to her next meal.  In these hungry moments I have to track her, jogging every now and then to keep up or risk being left behind.

I'd done my research and had planned a barbecued eel lunch.  However, as it was only mid-morning I convinced my hungrier half to sit for tea and snacks.  Without Google maps I doubt I would've found the tea house.  It was down a small alleyway between two houses.

We had our tea inside a tiny wooden building at the foot of a hill dotted with enormous poles of bamboo that swayed overhead.

The waitress didn't speak any English so we pointed at the menu and hoped for the best.  We debated the small snacks that came with the coffee and tea.  I don't know what they were but they tasted nice.  My coffee was accompanied by a small bamboo stirrer in a ceramic holster.  The stirrers were for sale so Dodo got one for Dad and looked relieved to have found him something.  For her, showing up empty-handed is a cardinal sin no matter how much I try to convince her otherwise.

The first time I tried unagi I didn't know what it was, which worked in my favor.  It's delicious but if I'd seen it prepared beforehand I would've looked elsewhere in the menu.  Clearly I'm not Japanese, who prefer to see their seafood killed in plain sight.  Everywhere you looked in Narita, wiggly eels were plucked from buckets, nailed alive to wooden tables and split lengthwise.  These gents inserted wooden splints into the corpses so that they could be propped over the charcoal.

I felt bad for the little guys until my unagi box was placed in front of me.  I was really looking forward to sinking my chopsticks in.

Unagi comes on a bed of rice with a side of pickles.  Freshly killed eel is meaty, so unlike the flat versions I'd had in Tokyo.  Each piece was noticeably heavy.

Full and sleepy, we took a stroll towards the temple.  It was surprising - a maze of ornate buildings on a wooded hillside. 

We bought crackers, cookies and a few small gifts.  We also tried the red bean pancakes from a small shop that cooked them in a large window.

Before we knew it, it was time to head back to the airport for our next flight.  We'd stayed so long that we got to see the kids coming home from school.  Check out that school uniform!