Saturday, October 10--Where's the fish?

Well, that didn’t exactly go as planned. 

Even though Jim is gone on a business trip, I decided to take part in the ITT tour to Tsukiji fish market today.  I knew this was not the early morning tour, so I would not be able to see the 5:00 a.m. tuna auction, but I figured at a market where approximately 2000 metric tons of seafood are bought and sold each day, there would be enough other stuff going on to justify the $27 tour cost.

Once the tour departed from the base, the guide informed us that he had not been originally scheduled for this trip, and was a last-minute replacement.  He rattled off the details of our itinerary, as well as some facts about each stop of the tour, like guides have done on previous trips we’d been on, so I was not really concerned about his commitment to this outing.  It wasn’t until we actually arrived at Tsukiji that his level of enthusiasm for this trip became evident.  We got off the bus and stood on a bustling street corner, where our guide handed us a very general map of the area.  Our fearless leader then raised his arm, pointed vaguely to the southeast, told us the market was down there, and warned us the bus would be leaving for the next stop in exactly two hours.  Uhh, okay, but I thought the point of this tour was to be TAKEN to the market.  If I wanted the confusion of trying to find it on my own, I’d have come by train.

To make a long story short, I spent most of my allotted two hours wandering around in a maze of stalls that ring the outside of the actual fish market, wading through throngs of people, trying not to lose my bearings among the endless look-alike rows of vegetable vendors and ramen hawkers.  By the time I accidentally stumbled upon the entrance to the fish market (cleverly disguised as an active loading dock), I had less than 30 minutes left to explore.  I carefully wove my way through buyers and delivery men maniacally trying to load and dispatch the morning’s purchases and finally ended up on the outskirts of an endless sea of wooden tables and water-filled tanks meant to display the unlucky creatures available for purchase.  As I stepped from the alley into the shade of the auction area, it quickly became clear that the day was already over.  In a few stalls, men were still packing up fish in Styrofoam coolers, but for the most part, workers clad in heavy rubber aprons and knee-high rubber boots were hosing down tables and scrubbing scales from the concrete floors.  A few who had already finished the day’s chores were sitting around on crates slurping ramen noodles.  Dejected and irritated, I made my way back to the bus and oohed over the digital pictures an acquaintance had taken of huge tuna being hacked into manageable pieces by a gleaming machete.  Now that’s what I expected to see when I set off on this adventure.  Guess I’ll have to try again another time.