OK sorry I’m late. I was off seeing my old co-worker Suzuki-san and when I got back I was kind of tired. I didn’t sleep well the previous night because of the overeating and my leg is hurting more. Fortunately, after breakfast I just got to sit on the Shinkansen for a few hours (on the Green car!) from Okayama to Tokyo.

Packing got much easier. I brought less clothing on this trip (as my mother always instructed me to do) and since it suddenly dropped in temperature I didn’t have to do laundry as often. Also, I packed all my weird Uniqlo Airism underpants that take up much less space than boxer shorts. And finally I dropped off my second pair of jeans for repair. They had a hole in the crotch so that definitely needed to be fixed before I wore them. I’m not some weird hipster and I’m too old for that kind of fashion. One thing I did pack was a second long-sleeved shirt (my usual Montbell shirt). Good thing too because I’ve been wearing three shirt layers every day since the temperature dropped.

Same Greenberry as the day before.

And then it was off to the station. The Green car was fairly empty and I fell asleep around the Kyoto stop. But after Nagoya I was just watching the builidngs go by. When I reached Fujieda I was afraid I missed Mt Fuji! Fortunately, I hadn’t. It was a fairly clear view today.

I got to Tokyo and I was in a bad mood. Wondered why I even bothered coming. But it didn’t take long to realize I was just hangry. I looked around for lunch and even went into the new Kabukicho tower.

After wandering for an hour I decided to make my third trip to Mos Burger. It’s comfort food for me.

Checked into the hotel and they were fairly insistent that I use the machine to check in. I think it was almost ten years ago when we found out that the “search by name” function wanted the EXACT spelling and the EXACT NAME ORDER or something and we wasted a bunch of time trying to check in with the machine. I’m not sure how booking.com gives them the details but it’s a bit odd. I just went to the desk.

I guess this is the one hotel that I didn’t pre-pay. I like pre-paying so I don’t have to think about how much I’m paying for the hotels. ¥70,643 for three nights! It’s $163 per night and since I never stay in hotels in the US that’s expensive to me! But they did put me on the top floor and here’s my view.

Now I can hit the top button on the elevator and think, “peasants” on the way up. Really, the room seems smaller than I remember so it’s not a big deal. At least I slept fairly well.

Oh, and I did head out to meet my old co-worker Suzuki-san. We went to a fish restaurant and had sushi and tempura. He’s still doing his “not leaving the apartment” thing and said he hadn’t left for 21 days! He buys enough groceries for three weeks at a time. And that means when I see him, he ends up eating things that he’s not used to and gets a stomach ache. It happened again. But we did get to talk for quite some time before we called it quits and I didn’t get back to my room until after 9:30pm.

That’s about it for that day. Now to decide what to do today…