After settling into our Tokyo hotel (our base for the next four nights) and a good night’s sleep after all of the Kyoto mileage, we awoke to different agendas. With George contributing to a three day conference, he set off for work leaving me to catch up with long lost friends.
Reunited with a friend and her daughter (who was now three years older and no longer the toddler I remember!) we set of for a ‘food sample’ making workshop. Food samples are brilliant when you arrive in a country without the ability to read the language and find yourself in search of food. Entire menus are displayed in plastic form outside restaurants and cafes and what you see is exactly what you get – drinks and all! Arriving at the quaint little workshop in a quiet neighbourhood we were informed we had booked onto the tart making course. Clearly a curious scene, my friend explained at length how she knew me to the owner’s genuine interest. We enjoyed choosing our plastic toppings and piping silicon into the tart cases before using tweezers to push sprinkles into the ‘cream’. Afterwards we were shown other sample foods in the window and the process of how restaurants ordered exact replica menus was explained to us. A strange but interesting business!
After a rice ball lunch in Shinjuku Station we headed over to the Government Metropolitan Building to enjoy the observation deck. Having visited several times before I was looking forward to the view from the 52nd floor and was secretly hoping for a glimpse of our old friend Fuji. Tokyo from above never gets old and never ceases to catch you when stepping out of the lift and seeing the metropolis stretching out to the horizon. The bright sunshine and haze meant that Fuji was elusive today (as it often is) but we spent a good hour identifying landmarks and watching the ant-like people going about their day below.
Finally, we boarded a train to Machida to meet all of my old colleagues for dinner. It has been nearly three years since a tearful goodbye with them at a coach station so it was brilliant to be together again. George eventually arrived too and we decided against Nomihodai (all you can drink!) after learning our lesson the hard way previously. Machida is just the next stop from our old home and was a place we visited on numerous occasions. Parting company with our friends and catching our old train back into the city, we felt like today had truly messed with our heads and it was entirely conceivable that we could go back to our flat and continue our Japanese lives as we had left them.
The Geos go back to Tokyo 