Day 3: Tokyo

Day 3: Tokyo

QOTD:  How hot was it? Honey, let’s go in and eat…

Weather: high 80s to low 90s, feels warmer, especially in the sun

Pics:  Roof art, Edo Museum (including lost in translation inscription and DB and Fusao sharing an i-phone operating system lesson), sumo wrestling site and wrestlers along with THB and his scorecard getting ready to enter the pavilion, and tables with hot briquettes in the middle (and it is 90 and humid out, nothing like having your personal heater at hand) and giant spider outside the Mori Museum

Breakfast buffet of yogurt topped with some crunchy cereal and ginger jam (a great combo) and mini-baguettes and butter. Fusao picks us up at 9 and we visit the Edo museum to get a taste of the history of Tokyo and the post road we’ll be walking. Right next door is the sumo wrestling venue, so we buy the cheap seats tickets (top row, $21 each) to get in and are thankful that the place is mostly empty (early matches are for junior wrestlers and not that interesting to most fans), we can get close for pictures and see the action and NOT sit in the expensive seats which are basically 4x4 flat areas (see pic with couple).

Matches last anywhere from 3 seconds (wham bam thank you ma'am) to maybe 1 minute; anything longer than 10 seconds and the ref is constantly calling out what sounded like “no wait” … aka, get on with it. After 15 or 20 matches, most lasting around 15 seconds, we’ve seen enough and head towards a famous Shinto Shrine (along with 10,000 other Tokyo-ites) to wish for good luck.

Upon arrival, THB wishes for a cool breeze and a nice brewski. Hey, it works because before even walking up to the shrine we duck into a ramen house, complete with a/c, and buy three bowls of ramen (THB gets miso with 5 very thin slices of pork) and THB and DB share a draft beer (pay by putting money into a vending machine), $20 for the two of us.

A bit more meandering and we decide it is time to head back to the hotel to rest up for our visit to the Mori Museum and dinner with the Yuko and YT (we met them on Easter Island, they must be surprised at how fast we took them up on a visit).

We are waiting on the 3rd floor at exactly 5pm when DB realizes we should check the phone and sure enough YT has left a message, THB figures out how to dial him from the message, and he answers: we're to meet on the 49th floor. Damn, THB knows how to use the phone...a shocker! (Of course, THB had managed to inadvertently switch the camera to video and used up the battery in no time. There are no totally tech-savvy days for THB.)

 

The Mori, on the 51^st floor of a modern high rise, is full of modern Japanese art on the cutting edge, most of it a bit too far out. Dinner is at the Roppongi Club, just two floors down from the Mori, where Yuko and YT are members, so we have a small private room overlooking Tokyo to the north as the lights come on across the city at sunset.Very nice!

Chinese is the night’s special cuisine, so we order too much dim sum, them a few too many main courses, and at least one too many desserts, a very nice bottle of reisling (more like a pinot blanc, fortunately), all very nice to very good, and catch up on everything that has happened in the last four months, and also a bit beyond (phew, THB has not had that much happen in the last four months). Their treat, back to the Park Hotel via the Oedo line ($4.30/pp round trip) and hopefully a restful sleep before our first day of walking (estimated at 7.5 miles).