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!

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...

First day in Tokyo

We slept pretty badly on the flight due to Marit's restlessness. The plane arrived in Tokyo at about 7am and we easily found the Keisei Skyliner train to Ueno, but for a reason we didn't immediately understand the lady gave us a ticket for the 9.26 train. We went down to the platform and the guy in charge down there looked at our tickets, tutted and bundled us onto the 7.56 train. It turned out that this was a special rush hour train that you needed a supplement for, and we were prepared to play the dumb tourist, but no-one checked the tickets so it wasn't necessary. With the quantity of luggage we had, transfer to the Ginza Metro line at Ueno wasn't that easy, but we managed. Luckily our hotel, the New Gyominzo, was right next to the Metro exit at Asakusa. We couldn't check in until 2pm but the elderly gentlemen at the reception let us have some kind of small private dining room to change out of our sweaty Melbourne winter clothes into something more appropriate for temperatures 20°C higher!

We left our bags at the hotel and went out to explore the Kamarimanon Temple. For me this was the chance to relive memories from 1997, when I stayed here after the ICBIC conference in Yokohama, but Marjolein was also enchanted, especially by the Edo-era stalls lining several hundred metres from the Kamarimanon Gate to the main shrine. We had lunch at a "sushi-boat" restaurant. Walking down the street immediately afterwards we had the quite bizarre experience of running into Michael Gajhede and Ole Kristensen, well-known faces from Copenhagen University. Of course it was clear that they were in Tokyo for a couple of days before the IUCr meeting in Osaka, but we could explain to them that we were just on holiday! Unfortunately they were being ushered into a restaurant by the waiter, so we didn't have much time to talk, and we were too tired to think of making plans to meet up later on.

Our Japanese-style room on the 8th floor was ** tatami mats in size and even came equipped with a kimono each:

As usual the bathroom seemed to have been fashioned from a single piece of plastic. We had our first experience of an automatic Japanese toilet seat, which flushes water as soon as you sit down on it, presumably to avoid potentially embarrassing noises emanating from the bathroom. Funnily enough I didn't see a single one of these in 1997...

After a short rest we walked to Ueno Park where we were met by a sea of Lotus. Quite a different park! Saskia wanted to take a trip in the pedal boats on the lake but it was a bit too late and it coud wait for one more day. We tried to find a restaurant in the busy streets south of Ueno Station and Saskia got into a flap because she wanted to have sushi a second time. Finally we settled on a Chinese restaurant and ate seafood dishes with lots of scallops - delicious.

Back at the hotel the view from the window was of the Asakusa Metro station and the Matsuya department store:

We slept like logs as we were so tired from the night before.