Took an epic, 12-hour jaunt around Sendai this past Monday.  Our original plan was simply to visit Asaichi, the Morning Market, to pick up some fresh-off-the-boat seafood for dinner.  It quickly mutated into an all out tour of the downtown area though.  Here’s the first leg of our trip.


View Around Sendai in a larger map

The Morning Market is located just a couple blocks from Sendai Station.  Basically it’s a single narrow street block consisting of plenty of seafood and produce dealers.  The clientele ranges from restaurant owners to old women.  All types of fresh fish, squid, octopus and crab are available, and you can usually haggle a bit on the price as many stalls are competing against each other for your hard earned yen.  It’s a great place to find deals on fruit and vegetables too, especially considering how expensive produce is in supermarkets and Japan in general.  Like most of these types of markets however, it’s been known to charge different prices to non-locals (foreigners and Japanese alike), so try to avoid buying anything that isn’t expressly priced beforehand.

Another benefit to shopping here is that you can often get quantity discounts.  This concept still hasn’t really caught on in Japan.  For example, if I buy one donut the price is 100 yen.  If I buy 100 donuts, the price is 10,000 yen.  At the market though, if you don’t seem to interested in the asking price the vendors will often throw in something extra at a discounted price.  Unfortunately I didn’t feel like gutting a huge squid when we bought a slab of tuna sashimi, so that kind of backfired on us.

It’s open Monday to Friday (excluding holidays), from early morning to mid afternoon.  If you’re visiting Sendai, or live here and want to pick up something for dinner, it’s definitely worth a look!

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