Day 4

Thanks for tuning in. Day 6 is really the best day to write about...but all in due time.

I woke up at 5:56am with a smile on my face. That's practically a normal wake up time.

This day got expensive really quick. Not because we were splurging, but because we did a few events that rang up the tab rather quickly.

We made our way to Roppongi Hills. Before we arrived to our destination, we stopped at a bakery and had a curry pan (japanese curry wrapped in a slightly chewy bun, fried with a light panko layer) and some kind of salmon cream cheese bun. Quite delicious.

We also made a pit stop at a book store where Sandra spent a lot of time looking at cook books that she couldn't read. Japanese printing is really appealing.

Finally, we made it to Roppongi Hills - an integrated developed blog complete with work, home, and shopping space. The theory is that, but not needing to commute, your quality of live would be better. I believe that.

We went up to the observation deck, which is the highest point in Tokyo ( I think), and included with the admissions fee was a free pass to the Mori Art Museum - also at the top of the building. The museum was showcasing pieces from the UBS collection. Sorry, no pics from the museum.

We had lunch at an Izakaya in Roppongi Hills. This is was one of the few meals that we felt like it would be weird to take a picture of. The place was full of office people on their lunch break. We were a little disappointed that they were serving Teishoku (set menu) lunches and not the Izakaya menu. However, as with all our meals in Tokyo, it was really tasty. Sandra had miso fish and sashimi, I had the tempura. Both meals came with a beverage of your choice, rice, pickles, and a soup full of vegetables, tofu and fish.

After lunch we had dessert, which cost as much as our lunch. Sandra wrote about it in her dessert post, so I won't add much to it. We also visited Foo:D supermarket. I'll write about grocery prices and the lack of fiber later.

We made the trek back to bookstore so that Sandra could buy some cookbooks and headed off to Ginza. Earlier in the day, we had booked a traditional tea ceremony at the Imperial Hotel. It's rare that I feel under dressed, but I definitely felt under dressed at this hotel with my collared shirt over dry fit long sleeve shirt, jeans, hiking boots and a backpack with a large poster attached to it. 90% of the men and half of the male children had suits on! We had a nice tea ceremony explained to us in Japanese. But, to be honest, it was a bit pricey for the 15 minute ceremony.

After the ceremony, we wandered the streets of Ginza again. I stopped by the Sony show room, Sandra spent another half hour in a bookstore looking at cookbooks, magazines, and cooking magazines she couldn't read. We met back up to wander some alleyways. We happened upon three food venues. The first, a Fugu shop. Fugu is the poisonous puffer fisn that if sliced incorrectly will release toxins which are fatal to humans. The chefs are government regulated. If a death occurs, the shop closes down. So rest assured, you're dining at a place where the chef has not failed (yet). We weren't going to test fate on our honeymoon.


I was lead to the next restaurant by my nose. Tucked away in a side alley of an alley was Torijin, a yakitori place. Yakitori restaurants serve skewers of every part of the chicken cooked on a natural flame grill. Torijin also specialized in flavored rice - Kamameshi. We had a fine meal here, but purposefully didn't fill up because we knew were we're going to get an unaju bento to go from the third restaurant we encountered on our walk.

Right after yakitori, we walked over to a 'fastfood' unagi joint and got a take out unaju for the hotel room. I was still famished after dinner. The unagi wasn't memorable. What I did notice, was that unagi was not dripping in sauce and also the rice was mixed with some flavor. The flavor was definitely less sweet and less salty that unaju dishes in the US. Look at that take out box! It looks like a wooden box. There was also a piece of absorbent material on the inside of the cover to soak up condensation. What a nice touch.

We got back to our hotel and got the massages that Sandra wrote about. We took off to wander Shinjuku and Kabukicho at 10pm to experience a bit of night life. There were tons of people out and about. But, at about 11:45 hoards of people headed to the subway as the last train is at 12am. A bit inconvenient that trains stop so early...but I guess that deters a lot of late night issues.

That's it for day 4.

Ivan