Asia Trip - April 20

 20 April 2025

A casual Easter Sunday. We specifically did shopping things to help have this Sunday be a day of rest. While we had a much easier day planned with plenty of rest, it was odd to not be home with the kids to enjoy the holiday. It was also odd to not participate in the Easter services. The beach was teeming with activity as a big number of people came to the coast to enjoy their weekend. There were dozens and dozens of wind or kite surfers. Scores of bicyclists enjoying the coast road. A high amount of foot traffic along the beach. It seemed that a lot of people had come out to enjoy our sandy beach.

Not very far from our house is a McDonald’s. Now, McDonald’s in the US gets a really bad wrap, and some of that is well deserved. While McD’s offers a great deal of consistency, it doesn’t seem to be of high quality or well assembled. My experience with international locations however is that not only is the menu slightly unique to the location, it is a noticeably nicer restaurant.

That continued to be true here, as we decided this would be our lunch. Several things stood out about our experience there. The menu was very specific to Japan, and a couple of us had a tonkotsu burger with tarter. Everything was well assembled, looked as appetizing on the tray as it does in the pictures. In addition, the buns on those tonkotsu burgers was an enriched bread that was light and fluffy, had a wonderful mouth feel. It genuinely seemed like it was made that day. It was possibly the best burger bun that I have ever had. April also got something that was rather novel, and took us a moment to figure out. She bought some Shaka Fries, with a specific flavoring. When a regular order of fries arrived we were rather surprised, but soon found that there was a special paper bag provided, and a flavor packet. After dumping the fries and flavor packet in the bag we shook it up. It was genuinely very good.

Another very nice thing was the layout of this location. It was a two story location, where you would order on the first floor, and the go upstairs and eat on the second floor with a view of ocean. The restaurant was clean with the table being cleaned by a worker right as we sat down. That worked was very attentive to the cleanliness needs of the entire dining level, and always on top of any needs. The food was brought to our table by a very kind server. They also shared with us that we had a limited amount of time to stay at the restaurant. I guess enough people come to just hang out that they need to keep the tables cycling.

In all, this McDonald’s did a great job of providing a good dining experience, and was very pleasant.

We were able to enjoy a movie. Everyone humored me to watch ‘The Last Samurai’ (2003) as a Japanese themed movie while we were in Japan. It is a movie that I have seen before and very much enjoyed. Seeing it while there, where I was in a specific Japanese mindset, was particularly enjoyable. Given that we had spent the day before in Yokohama, a prominent location in the film, we started to compare what history we knew with the dates that the movie was presenting. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t hold up to history at all, but it was still fun to watch.

At one point we thought we felt an earthquake, so we looked it up, and sure enough it had been a little one.

Following the movie, at a particularly low tide, Becky, April, and I went for a walk on the beach. April was kind enough to act as guide as she and Marty had already been on the beach. We found a variety of stunning sea shells, were able to enjoy some tide pools, and just in general enjoy the breeze in our hair and sand on our feet. There is something so wonderful about being next to the ocean, and I really like it.

Four our final dinner on our trip, we visited Kaisen sushi restaurant. It seemed well recommended by our host, as well as had good reviews online. They recently updated their system to allow iPad ordering, and had removed the conveyor belt. Their service was very quick, and they had a very large variety of items. They boasted that the majority of their menu was locally sourced and freshly caught, and at the time they were offering a wide variety of tuna types, in fact more types of tuna than I have ever had on a sushi menu. They also featured a variety nigiri that included horse meat. In all, it was a very pleasant experience, and we had our fill on a variety of delicious roles.

With that, we knew that the next day would be a very very busy travel day. We did all that we could to prepare for the journey by packing up a bunch, and buying some train tickets ahead of time. We also needed to try and get an early nights rest. Becky unfortunately didn’t feel very well, which cut into the sleep time.