Okadaya, Odakyu and several department stores

A miserable rainy day in Tokyo, but in contrast to Melbourne the rain is at least 15°C warmer! First thing on the agenda was back to Okadaya now to purchase some yarn & pattern books. We spent a lot of time at department stores in various places, which is always a pleasant experience in Japan: strolling through the vast food halls with so many things that just look so delicious, the elegant household departments, the roof gardens and so much more. We had lunch in one of the department stores and indeed it was good again. In the late afternoon we headed for the Imperial Palace, but it turned out that the gardens were closed at the weekends, so there wasn't much to see. Unfortunately the rain became slowly more and more intense and we needed a drier place since we had only two umbrellas to share. Let's hope that tomorrow will be a drier day! It is kind of interesting though to see the seas of umbrella on the streets.

However from the Imperial Palace it was only a short walk to Ginza. We stopped off at a French café called "Aux Bacchanales" that was so hyper-authentically Parisian that I kept thinking "What are all these Japanese people

doing here?" and when the waitress brought us jus des pomme the confusion was complete. Saskia fell asleep and was extremely grumpy when we woke her up. (Actually at the moment she has a daily tantrum at the moment around dinner time.) This made finding somewhere to eat in the icy sophisticated wasteland of Ginza well-nigh impossible so we jumped on the Ginza line back to Asakusa, dropped our bags off at the hotel and ate dinner in what turned out to be not a very good local restaurant which had a bit of everything on its menu. Well if we play our cards right tomorrow this will probably be the only sub-standard meal in Japan!