Jet lag has yet to really lay into us and we managed a day covering the highlights of Tokyo. Gabe was keen to see the Godzilla Head that loomed over the roof of a cinema that turned out to be just a few hundreds metres from our hotel. Before that I introduced Gabe to Japanese breakfast, he stuck to eggs and bacon to accompany his miso soup and rice. I partook of the same with salmon and a side of beef to provide me up. The other nuance to the meal was ordering it via a vending machine but the clincher was the complement of ice green tea that went along with it.
From there we acquainted ourselves with the neon of Shinjuku and then we scampered across the city to check off as many of the highlights as we could from Gabe’s Lego set of the Tokyo skyline. We got Tokyo Tower and Tokyo Sky Tree, where we dawdled for a lunch we cobbled together from the food vendors there. Navigating the subways and rail were a bit more than I would have liked but I got the hang of it by the end of the day.
The highlight of the day was catching up with old friends and having some chanko nabe for supper. Chanko nabe is the typical bulking-up diet of sumo wrestlers and it makes for a hardy warm bit of comfort food as the spring winds continue to chill the bones today.
We even managed to navigate relatively well as we sought to get back to our hotel, something we found problematic upon our arrival. There were three hotels with the same chain all within 700m of one another and having near similar names, owing to the neighbourhood that were all located in. We were a little wary of that as we made our way back tonight but managed to aim ourselves at “our” hotel well enough not to see either of the other two.
