Tokyo

It was quite noisy first thing, with lots of sirens and megaphoned voices. Welcome to the working week. We got off to a slow start.

I did some washing, and it was after 10:30 before we got to the railway station. Our first stop was the Imperial Palace and its gardens. They are open to the public sometimes, but not today.

So we walked around quite a way, and then caught a subway train to Shinjuku, Tokyo's busiest station. We had lunch in an Italian cafe, (Kaori and Steve are sick of Japanese food), then walked to the municipal office building, which has observation floors at the 45th level on each of its two towers.

We visited both, and wandered for quite a while, but there was no break in the cloud and haze, so we didn't see Fuji today. We really were lucky yesterday.



Then we went home again.
Steve borrowed the computer and discovered that Chick Corea is playing tonight at the Tokyo Blue Note Bar, so he got Kaori to phone and book him in, and off he went, not sure of how or where he was going. We went with Kaori to the doner kebab stall we had seen at the market last night,

then she went off on her own to another part of town to check out some tourist sights she'd read about. We walked the long way back,


and are having icecreams.