Arriving in Toyko
It took us nearly two hours to get to Inchon airport leaving Seoul and over an hour to get from Narita to our hotel in downtown Tokyo so that all took longer that our one hour fifty minute flight, but we’re here. It’s big, more in a Los Angeles kind of way than a New York City way. It does have an extensive subway system and after we got in Sunday afternoon we took the subway to the Ginza area with all of its high end shops and restaurants. The Wall Street Journal seems to run a story every other week on the high cost of dining in Tokyo and I’m sure if you go to a business type restaurant for Kobe steak that is true. We had dinner at a cute tempura restaurant for under twenty bucks and it was terrific.
We bought tickets today for the Shinkensen high speed train to Kyoto. We leave Tokyo tomorrow. We ran around a lot today and took a walk around the Imperial Palace. (You can’t go in, it’s all restricted.) But the grounds are lovely. Then we went on to the Meiji shrine. It’s in a big Central Park like setting. It was raining a bit but we took the fairly long hike into the park to see the shrine. I’m glad we did, it was lovely. A traditional Japanese courtyard in surrounded by large palace halls. People leave prayers there and I said a birthday prayer for my father who will be 96 years old this week. Again, we had a cheap lunch at a pho restaurant. To order you put your money in a machine with little pictures for each dish. The machine spits out a ticket with your order, which you then hand to the server and seat yourself at a counter. Speaking of food, I had a traditional Japanese breakfast this morning, dried fish, rice and pickled veggies. It was yummy.
The Japanese live up to their reputation for sybaritic pampering. Wonderful toiletries at our hotel. And when we went up to the business center to print out some material there was a massage chair that felt wonderful.
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