Day 14: We continue to explore. Day by day, we hack away a few more meters of jungle with our machetes, but the work is slow and we frequently have to stop so the coolies can sharpen our blades. They seem to be growing restless due to the steady diet of teishoku and Indian, and some of us among the expedition’s leadership team are afraid that if too many of them get machetes at once we could face an uprising.
Today we stumbled into a small clearing in the jungle near the north bus terminal of Tokyo Station (Sapia Tower) and on the second floor were confronted by a Starbucks, a Papa Milano (cheap chain Italian), a convenience store, and a soba place. Exhausted from our travails, we said ‘stuff it’ and went for the soba.
Rinya’s soba was reasonable, their tsuyu quite good, and the tempura (mixed for Koala, croquette for me) was light and fresh. Tempura is a funny thing, isn’t it? I think the expensive stuff is expensive because they use wonderful copper pots and pure sesame oil, and also because they change the oil every 15 minutes or something. I need to try one of those places before passing judgement, but until then this cheap tempura is just fine for me as long as it’s fresh.
Not sure how this became a tempura post, but Rinya is perfectly good when you want a soba lunch, and more to the point wasn’t full at 12:30, which is an excellent course of events if you’ve been chopping jungle vines all morning.