Finally the pedal boats!

We strolled to Ueno Park again, this time stopping to take in the restaurant wares shops on ***. Saskia and Marit were really taken with the plastic food displays and we bought a couple of souvenirs in a shop that sold key-rings and fridge magnets in the shape of all sorts of Japanese food. The best ones are probably the cups of coffee with milk being poured in from a jug that sits firmly on the top of the plastic stream of milk! Anyway, Saskia got a nori roll. Next we had half an hour in a swan boat on the lake.

We had lunch at a tempura restaurant and wondered if it was possible to eat a bad meal in Japan. Here's Marit practising noisy slurping:

Then we took the Metro to Shibuya to try and find Tokyo Hands, a crafts shop that Marjolein was particularly interested in. Since we didn't have an exact address (and it probably wouldn't have helped even if we had!) we asked a policeman and he put us right. Marjolein was a bit disappointed by the wool selection at Tokyo Hands so we headed for Shinjuku to seek out Okadaya. Unfortunately we got lost looking for it since the station is gigantic with a million exits and a sign system that takes some time to get used to. By the time we found the shop it was 20.15 and there were only 15 minuted to go to closing time but that was enough to see that w had to come back the next day! We had dinner in an excellent sushi restaurant in Shinjuku. Marjolein and I had sashimi that was probably even better than the one in Monterey, and it cost 2000 yen, i.e. 110 SEK. This is something else that I find completely different to 1997: everything seems so cheap now! maybe it's because I'm not a postdoc any more, maybe the exchange rate is better. Probably a combination of both. In any case it seems quite incredible that you can eat such good food so cheaply in a city that once had the reputation of being one of the most expensive in the world. Everything is also so elegant that you would like to photograph it all, at the risk of looking a bit foolish...