Gindaco – Anne Goes to Places

JANUARY 14, 2016

Thanks to our company, I was able to go to my dream country since high school. Since it was in January, it was still winter in Japan so being from a tropical country, it was a challenge to look for and buy winter wear. I already had a few winter clothes from our Korea trip last 2014 but I saw Uniqlo Megamall selling HEATTECH EXTRA WARM tops. I knew that I had to buy at least two since I tend to feel cold easily. A few tips when looking for winter wear:

Uniqlo and H&M are go-to places for both clothes and accessories. Best to go there during sale since you can get 20-70% discount.
I was lucky that our Korea and Japan trip happened in mid- to late January so I was able to take advantage of the end-of-season sale in various stores.
Some of my friends also told me that you can get good items in ukay-ukay stores. I went with some of my office mates before our Japan trip and true enough, everything was cheap — boots around Php 300-600, coats for about Php 400-800.
“Cheapest” way is to find a relative or close friend who has the same size as yours and borrow some clothes and coat. 😉

Back to my actual travel — our first day was dedicated for our flight to Tokyo, and we arrived at Narita International Airport around 4PM. Note that Japan is 1 hour ahead of Manila.

Thanks for the safe flight, Delta Airlines!

We met with our tour guide, Toshi-san — even if he is already a senior citizen, he walked so fast and he was quite talkative! From the airport, he took us to an area near Akasaka to have dinner at TOFURO RESTAURANT.

Most of the dishes we had tasted good. There were only 2 dishes that I was not a fan of, but mainly because of personal preference — these had white/red beans in it.

After dinner, we headed to HOTEL MONTEREY AKASAKA for check-in. The room was quite small for 2 people but not really complaining since the bedroom and bathroom were both really clean and neat. Japanese toilet is also awesome, by the way. Toshi-san warned us though that it is not advisable to buy and bring one home since as far as he knows, the water used in Japan and Philippines are of different kinds.

Once we have checked in and rested for a bit, we decided to go out for midnight snacks. But first, we had to look for Uniqlo so that a few of our office mates could buy winter clothes and accessories…

Unfortunately, one of my office mates and I got separated from the group. Getting lost was not that bad though since we were able to see a few more sights in the area…

Back to one of Akasaka’s alleys

Beverage vendo — you can find this everywhere!

Eventually, we were able to contact each other (thanks Viber!) and decided to re-group in our hotel. After getting back together, we decided to look for a place to have our midnight snack. We passed by Gindaco Highball Sakaba which was full of people standing up — both inside the store and outside the freezing street. We roamed around the area for a few more minutes until we decided to go back to Gindaco. The only available table was only outside but we did not mind since we were hungry already. Interesting to note that it is a standing bar so all customers were just standing while eating and drinking. It was unusual for us but a cool experience.

Back to the food — I was so excited to order since their main item is takoyaki. Yay!

Their takoyaki was really big compared to those sold here in MNL + each plump ball contained a big chunk of octopus. Each bite was really good and even Hana’s (Little Tokyo) paled in comparison with this one. They also offer other variations of takoyaki such as green onion and cheese.