I wish i was a fisherman...

I've been sitting in my house in a wee bit of a daze today, alternating bursts of manic spring cleaning with the intense desire to curl up in a tiny ball under some blankets and sleep for days. this is mainly because of the fisherman-like hours i was keeping yesterday. amir and i decided that this would be the weekend to go to tsukiji fish market in tokyo, since monday is a holiday and we would have more recovery time from the crazy-early start we'd have to get to go. anyway, we got the 3am saturday morning train to tokyo, got in there for 5am then headed straight to tsukiji because the auctions start from 5.

tsukiji is the biggest fish market in the world, operating every day except sundays and holidays and selling most of the world's tuna. you really have to see this place to believe it - hundreds of enormous dead tuna lying either fresh or deep frozen on warehouse floors, while men in a uniform of aprons, wellies and cigarettes shout perhaps in japanese though it just sounds like grunting to bid for the poor beasts, while looking at the fish flesh with torches and scooping bits of meat out with their fingers to make sure they're buying Good Shit. because just one of these monstrous tuna will set you back something like 2000 euro.

(In case you're wondering what the things that look like missiles in the picture above are, they would be frozen whole tuna.)

outside of the warehouses, hundreds of stalls sell the less illustrious fish, keeping them alive until someone hands over the cash, then unceremoniously beheading and gutting them in front of your very eyes. the whole procedure looks like a painful as hell way to die, but the executioners of the doomed fish do all this quite cheerfully.

(this poor fella looked straight at us as he was meeting his maker. eerie...)

in the midst of all the fish blood and entrails, men on crazy motorised carts zip about the place, not really looking where they're going (i saw one guy merrily driving along sending a text message before almost ploughing into an unsuspecting american woman) and assuming that you will get out of the way before they run you over. the carts are steered by these big giant barrel-shaped wheels at the front of the vehicles, weird looking things that make you think you've accidentally stumbled into an episode of Dr Who. it's all a bit surreal - it doesn't feel like tokyo, or japan for that matter. gone is all the politeness and decorum that is so prevalent in pretty much all walks of japanese society, and it's replaced by a haphazard, pre-dawn mania that is made all the more confusing by the fact that you're walking around totally sleep-deprived. it's a scary scary place, but fuck me it's great craic. i can't explain exactly why, and i know that walking round a fish market at 5.30am on a saturday doesn't exactly sound like a good time, but it was one of the coolest experiences we've had since coming here.(5am louise - dazed, confused and smelling of fish)

after seeing all we could see, we headed for one of the sushi restaurants in the market to taste possibly the freshest sushi that can be found in the whole world. we had to stand in line for an hour to get a seat, but jaysus it was worth it - the sushi literally melted on your tongue and tasted exquisite. we sampled 3 parts of tuna, each with a different fat content, enormous shrimp, slivers of squid, sea urchin (which we had trouble keeping down because the texture just makes you want to hurl), egg and miso soup, all washed down with some green tea. we were so ensconsed in the consumption of our breakfast, and so taken aback by how tasty it all was, that we forgot to take a single photo of what we ate. that's how distractingly good it all was. and that's how sleepy-stupid we were. ah well, we'll just have to go back again some time.