The Unlawyer

One fine crisp September morning Mrs. Unlawyer and I found ourselves inside the La Boqueria market [its formal name is Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria - Ed.] off La Rambla in Barcelona. We really had no intent of sticking around for too long as we had to catch a train to Girona for lunch later in the day.

Then, I was excitedly dragged off by Mrs. Unlawyer to a corridor and pointed to a small restaurant near the entrance to the market called Bar Pinotxo. Now until that day I had never heard of this eatery but she insisted that we take our breakfast there, and so we braved the crowd and patiently waited for seats at the counter, of which we were soon rewarded with.

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Readers of this blog may recall that I was treated by Mrs. Unlawyer’s friends in Barcelona to a nice dinner at the Ciutat Comdal [Ciudad Condal in Spanish - Ed.] tapas bar and restaurant some three years ago. I finally got the chance to take Mrs. Unlawyer to this cerveceria last year, on the occasion of her first trip to this, the capital of Catalunya.

Ciutat Comdal is located just one block away from Plaza de Catalunya, in the heart of Barcelona’s tourist district.

Did many things change in the time I was away?

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On our second night in Tokyo, Mrs. Unlawyer and I met up with Liezl, her Tokyo-based friend, and her husband Yuki. She invited us to dinner at Tsuki no Shizuku, an izakaya within walking distance from the Sony Building and the JR Yurakucho Station in that city’s Ginza district.

Until then, I have never set foot in an izakaya, a Japanese-style pub if you will, so it was a novel experience not just for myself but for Mrs. Unlawyer as well.

Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of what the inside of this izakaya looks like. From what I saw though, this izakaya’s dining hall is divided into several spaces: a bar for individual diners, the usual tables, and private rooms. Orders are taken either by waiters or by using a menu embedded in a tablet computer. I didn’t take any pictures of that too but if you like you can take a look at Chuvaness’ blog and see how it works.

On the other hand, I did get to take plenty of pictures of what we ate and, man oh man, was it good!

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One of the highlights of our recent Tokyo vacation was the chance to experience Japanese food culture in its home country. Granted, we did not get to eat at the restaurants we really wanted to visit but the places we did get to see was more than enough to satisfy our craving and yes, whetted our appetites for more.

Take for example this food hall at the first floor of the newly-opened Atré 1 Akihabara shopping center just beside the Akihabara Electric Town exit of Akihabara station. It certainly isn’t the biggest but its stores serve many varieties of Japanese cuisine.

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After visiting the Senso-ji grounds Mrs. Unlawyer, the kids, and I found ourselves looking for the Waentei-Kikko restaurant to order a bento box lunch and perhaps catch a shamisen performance but no, it was already closed for the New Year’s holidays.

We scrambled around for a place to eat until we stumbled on a restaurant just parallel to the Nakamise-dori shopping street leading to the temple. We immediately knew that soba was its specialty, thanks to the display in front, but only got to know its name – Towada – and how popular it was while I was doing research for this entry.

So we stepped inside and waited a few minutes until a table was found for us. Naturally I asked for some chilled soba.

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New Year’s Day found Mrs. Unlawyer, our children, and I with precisely nothing to do in Tokyo, as almost everything was closed on that day. Fortunately, a Tokyo-based friend of Mrs. Unlawyer’s furnished us a list of places that she thought would be open on that holiday.

One of them was an onsen in Odaiba called Oedo Onsen Monogatari.

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