Recently I went to Sunshine City, Tokyo’s oldest “city within a city” and visited Namco Namja Town. Namja Town is a “theme park,” although usually when I hear that phrase I think of a place with roller coasters. This place turned out to be more of a children’s attraction, with the ever-present claw games, some game where kids ran around scanning random objects with a big plastic scanner thingy looking for ghosts, and a few video games.

Yet despite it’s roller coaster deficit, I was not disappointed, for I came with only two attractions in mind: Gyoza Stadium and Ice Cream City.

In case you don’t know, gyoza are also called pot-stickers or dumplings and they are delicious. I know the place isn’t much to look at in the pictures. But if you know me then I can put it this way: gyoza are stuffed full of cabbage and often onions and I don’t even know what else and don’t care because I will eat 3 dozen of them if you fry them and put them in front of me with some ponzu sauce.

And I had ice cream from one of the half dozen ice cream vendors in Ice Cream City.

Lots and lots…

…of ice cream flavors to choose from.

I ordered six flavors from this menu:

My choices, from left to right, top row first:

1. #1 Golden vanilla (delicious, but still just vanilla ice cream)
2. #3 Hokkaido shirataki potato ice cream (incredibly good, had little tiny bits of potato in it that melted in your mouth with the rest of the ice cream)
3. #11 Double cheese (my favorite of the bunch, how did they make cheese taste even better?)
4. #25 Homemade ice cream corn (corn flavored ice cream, believe it or not my second favorite of the bunch
5. #30 Milk (yes, milk flavored ice cream. not sure how that works, but it did taste more like milk than the rest. also delicious of course)
6. #50 Whisky (the whisky flavor was abundant and really not very good. you can taste this at home by just taking a sip of whisky with a bite of vanilla ice cream.)