Heading back to Japan from America means that although you “gain” a day going there, you essentially “lose out” on time coming back, so even though I wanted to be back on Monday Japan time, that meant leaving Saturday evening in America.
June 8th: Although my flight was technically at 1am on June 9th, that really meant leaving the house on the evening of the 8th to account for LA traffic and airport hold up. While there wasn’t actually too much traffic, I’m still glad I got there early because the line for security ended up pretty long (as it usually it is in America).
My flight ended up delayed an hour, but in increments, from 20 minutes, to 30 minutes, to a final 15 minutes due to maintenance. The flight wasx a bit turbulent at first, but ended up calming down for most of the rest.
Although this flight is longer than the Tokyo to LA one, for some reason there is less meal service (they probably expect you to sleep for most of it). About 2 hours into the flight, we got a snack box, with a tuna salad croissant sandwich, a banana, and a prepackaged chocolate cookie. I also decided to work up the courage to try out the ANA Original Aromatic Kabosu drink, after I overheard an attendant tell someone else it’s a “sort-of lemonade” in English. Kabosu is a Japanese citrus, and though it comes with honey (according to the online drink menu), I’m not generally a citrus person so I wasn’t sure how it’d be. I can go for a lemonade though, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try.
The banana was a pretty standard unripe banana, but cold. I’ve never had a tuna sandwich before, but the filling was pretty salty, a bit pasty, and was kind of ok. I still finished the small thing though. I ate the cookie later, and it was fine, kind of dry, crumbly, cakey, and very prepackaged mass-produced chocolatey cookie.
The Aromatic Kabosu was surprisingly really good, which also made me wonder how much honey was added to cancel out the sourness. It’s definitely a lemonade adjacent drink, not too sweet, with still some of the fruit’s natural flavor coming through. I’d definitely recommend it with some ice for anyone taking an ANA flight.
Again, about two hours before landing, they started breakfast service. Now, the main choice was between Shrimp Tempura and Vegetables over Rice or a Beef and Pork Hamburg Steak with Gravy, and now I’m usually not a hamburg person, I figured that one would probably heat up better than tempura. What was funny was the attendants were calling out Tempura or Beef, and when I asked, I said the hamburg. The attendant insisted they didn’t have hamburg and only beef, but I did a double take because both the Japanese and English said hamburg…she later realized and apologized, but I found that funny as a non-Japanese person reading the Japanese as opposed to the Japanese flight attendant. This would eventually not matter, as it seemed the hamburgs were pretty popular and they needed extra time to heat them up. For some reason, everyone around me, including the people behind me got their hamburgs, which made me suspicious as to why I was made to wait, and eventually, an attendant comes up to me and goes, “Sorry, we ran out. Is tempura ok?”. I guess it is, since I wanted a full meal, so I took it. I think that’s pretty rude, especially given I saw people behind me get what they wanted. I wouldn’t care if they told me coming down the aisle, “Sorry, we ran out of beef. The only choice left is the tempura,” but to take my order and backtrack is pretty rude in my opinion. Especially so when people in the front get priority, and I clearly see people behind me with non-tempura meals and getting offered bread later.
The rest of the set came with udon noodles with sauce, fruit, and yogurt.
The noodles were pretty good, thin and chewy, with a classic noodle sauce, and very refreshing as they were cold. I think this fruit was better than the fruit going to LA, and the yogurt was a pretty standard American yogurt. The main was pretty much as expected, soggy tempura, imagine reheating up leftover tempura in the microwave at home. Came with one shrimp, and imitation crab, with some vegetables covered in a tempura sauce. Rice was still not bad which I appreciated.
We landed around 5:30am on June 10th, on a rainy Tokyo, humid day. While my status as a resident really helps me skip the immigration line, in the end it doesn’t help that much as I still have to wait for my suitcase to come out. Once it did, handing it off to the domestic connections check-in was way easier than the last time. Then it was off to Terminal 2 to go find something to eat! I could have tried looking in Terminal 3, but I figured it was better to be safe and in Terminal 2 where my domestic flight would be.
That early in the morning (around 6, before 7am), the only places that were open were udon, tempura, soba shops, bento takeout shops, or Starbucks, and I wasn’t particularly in the mood for these. Luckily, as I was walking around and browsing the options, I stumbled upon Komeraku, an ochazuke spot, which was opening just at 7am. The options here seemed a little more unique, which made it more enticing than a typical udon or soba.
After browsing the menu, I decided on the Hokkai Seafood Ohitsugohan (ironically, I would be going to Hokkaido) because it had the options that best fit my likes and tastes, with ikura, torosalmon, snow crab and even uni. Every set comes with the main rice bowl of your choosing, their special dashi, their special sauce, and two side dishes.
A small bowl is provided so you can customize your ochazuke to your own liking, You can pour their sauce over the rice, add the dashi, and even the unlimited extras they have for communal use: nori, small crispies, bonito flakes, and wasabi. No wasabi for me.
The sauce itself tasted pretty acidic, with some ginger notes. I wasn’t a fan of it by itself, but it surprisingly worked well once a little was mixed in with the rice. The salmon was nice and tender, ikura was pretty standard, crab was a decent amount, and one slice(?) of uni was on top. At first, I had a little bit of each by itself to taste just the ingredients, and I thought the uni was pretty good. However when I wanted to savor the uni by itself with some rice, it had kind of a funky aftertaste to it. Adding the extras along with the very flavorful bonito stock dashi made it a really comforting meal.
The potato salad was fine, and the burdock root had a hit of something I wasn’t a fan of. Still, overall a pretty healthy breakfast.
After my flight had been slightly delayed, I made it to slightly gloomy Hokkaido safe around 11, and rode on the rain to Sapporo to go grab some lunch. I wasn’t craving anything in particular around the station area (I’m not dragging a suitcase to Susukino with me), but inspired by my family getting Korean food in America, I also decided to get Korean at a place on my to-try list in Stellar Place.
The menu is by no means super authentic, but there are a variety of “Korean” dishes. Since summeris now here, they had this enticing summer cold noodle set, but I decided to go with their seolleongtang jjigae (840 yen), which to my knowledge, is not actually a thing (The menu also had a seolleongtang gukbap, but that had rice mixed in, which I’d rather not). It’s a beef soup that comes with shiimeji, green onion, beansprouts, glass noodles, carrots, and slices of beef belly. It’s the closest to the soups I do like, and with it kind of missing something, I added on the rice set that comes with rice, kimchi, namul, and Korean seaweed (380 yen). It’s quite interesting that the menu lists kcal, salt amount, and potential allergens for the main dishes.
Is this a seolleongtang? No. Was it good? Mostly. The kimchi in the rice set turned out to be a few kimchi’d cucumbers, and the namul was bean sprouts. There were a ton of vegetables in the soup, whereas normal seolleongtang has no vegetables, so I suppose I appreciate that. Normal seolleongtang has chunks of thinly sliced tender beef. Yes the beef slices were thinly sliced and I suppose tender, but they were mostly strands of cut beef belly, with lots of fatty slices. The soup itself was pretty good, though it’s not as creamy or super beefy as normal seolleongtang is. Makes me curious as to how they made this.
I was also originally saving room so I could go get Afternoon Tea’s newest seasonal afternoon tea set, featuring matcha from Kyoto. The afternoon tea always starts 2pm and after, and I was bit early, arriving around 1:30. After reading over the menu, I ultimately decided that I was good on this seasonal. I’m a huge matcha girlie, but some of the sweets seemed a bit extra or not to my taste. For the record, the sweets this time consisted of a yuzu and lime matcha shortcake, matcha and raspberry parfait, matcha and milk pudding with caramel passion sauce, an additional sweet of your choosing (the seasonal was the matha and lemon scone), and a drink.
I wouldn’t have made the bus at 2, so I decided to take my time and take the next one.
I headed downstairs to check out the LeTao selection for this month, and ended up buying some June exclusive items: the Milky Pudding Mangu (648 yen), and the Renkatou Peach Roll Cake (583 yen).
Apparently the mango pudding had some alcohol in it (just a smidge), but I didn’t taste that at all. Instead it was silky, soft, with some mango chunks on top and cream to go with it. The roll cake was realy good, fluffy, creamy, and the peaches kind of reminiscent of canned peaches.
Akarenga Terrace had a new donut shop open recently apparently, so I went upstiars to check it out. They looked really good, except I guess they sold out of their morning stock, and donuts would be ready to be sold again at 3. Dang, I needed to catch the bus at 3…perhaps another time.
Of course, I needed to grab boba for the way back, so I went to Gong Cha. Read about my boba here!
I got on the bus at 3 to go home, and my friend graciously picked me up to take me hoome despite it not raining anymore.
And that was the return trip. The trip to America is here!
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