Common Census

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Tokyo Days 5-6

So, yesterday we moved from the Capitol Tokyu over to the Grand Hyatt Tokyo at Roppongi Hills. The 20 minute cab ride over was so exhausting we crashed for much of the morning.

We got up finally to get some lunch at a donburi place in the Roppongi Hills complex. We also walked around the complex a bit and found a puppy store called Dog's Care Joker 六本木ヒルズ店. I truly mean puppy store, they had maybe 10-12 6-8 week old puppies. No, we did not acquire any of them. They also had many various sweaters and jackets for dogs, any one of which Frisket would likely maul us for buying for her.

We then headed over to the Ginza district for some shopping at 無印良品 (Muji) where Lisa stocked up on pens and I decided that a Japanese XL was probably not even remotely close to a size I could wear. I did get to check out a neat Muji-Infill collaboration on a pre-fab house. Housing costs in Tokyo make the costs in New York look cheap, and this Muji-Infill project is an attempt to bring the cost of building down (once you've acquired the land). Unfortunately they had no brochures in any language I can read and the web site is Japanese-only so this could also be a secret project to build very small hotel rooms for extraterrestrials.

We walked around the Ginza area a bit, stopping at the main Sony store and showcase as well as the Apple Store. We finished up the afternoon with a stop at a sake bar by the Apple store where we had some delicious sake neither us can remember the name of. And, no, it's not because we had too much sake.

For dinner Friday night we hooked up with some others from the group we're with and had dinner at an Indian restaurant called Diya in the Roppongi Hills complex. Indian? Yes. One can only have so much sushi, sashimi, robayataki, and nori. The food was delicious. There's many, many restaurants in the complex. I need to come up with some sort of excuse which manages to pay for the airfare here and hotel stay in order to eat at a few more of them.

Backing up a bit...Thursday night we ate dinner with the group at Roppongi Robataya. Very fun and delicious, with the added benefit that they didn't kill me with flying prawns. A bit long, I think towards the end other members of the group were fading pretty quickly (still only their first day in Japan). But it was a multi-course, open-pit barbeque consisting of various vegetables, meats, cooked fish, prawns (I can't vouch for the prawns since I obviously didn't try them). I would not recommend it for the first night or two in Tokyo unless you don't suffer from jet lag, otherwise make it a stop on your next trip (I'm looking at you Todd).

Today we did a walking tour of the Ueno area with a friend of the Gilbert family. I took some photos which I'll add to the flickr set for the trip, but nothing of consequence, just a nice ramble through a neighborhood very much off the tourist track. Lisa and I cut out a bit early to rest up before the party tonight.

Tomorrow we head to Kyoto. I'm not sure what the broadband situation will be like so I may well not post an update again until we return on Tuesday.