Change In Plans

This short post is about our first full day in Tokyo.

After watching videos in the business center from 4:30 to 5:30 am, Zola, Tallulah and I went out for a pre-dawn walk. 

Shinjuku-chuo Park is directly across the street from our hotel, and we found two great playgrounds right away.  There were no kids playing so early, but there were about a dozen sweat-suit-clad elders doing exercises and stretching on the playground equipment.  Tallulah systematically tried out every swing, slide, seesaw, and monkey bar in both areas.  All three of us enjoyed a smooth-concrete slide which looked like a sine wave about 12 feet high.  The back side of the wave had ladder steps built into it, and the front side slid steeply down into a sand pit. 

The kids and I bought breakfast -possibly the most wack breakfast of their lives- at an am pm convenience store across from the park.  Overwhelmed by unfamiliarity and choice, Tallulah and I bought pudding, two giant carrots, Cheetos, two yogurts, muffin-looking steam cakes, salted nuts, and a hot dog on a stick.  Zola was too busy scanning the racks of comics for Pokemon to help with the shopping.  I asked for hot coffee, and was directed to a warm display case full of canned espresso (not as bad as it sounds).  We ate sitting on a giant concrete whale in the playground.

India went for a run, and then I went for a run, then we got dressed, then we did schoolwork for a while, then we had another breakfast.  Suddenly it was 11am, and we needed a plan.

We decided to go to Odaiba, and ride the largest ferris wheel in the world.  What ensured was a minor Dingle (ie, our word for a confusing waste of time due to bad planning or communication).

We took the jampacked JR Yamanote train from Shinjuku Station toward Shimbashi, about 30 minutes away.  One stop before we had planned to get off, I made the (bad) executive decision to disembark and switch to the monorail, which I had read was a fun alternative .  Because we couldn’t quite figure out the monorail, Lu was already deeply asleep in the stroller, and Zola was staggering tired, India made the (good) executive decision for us to declare vistory and retreat.  We got on another train and rode back to Shinjuku.  All in, about 90 minutes of unproductive wandering in the Tokyo public-transport system.

We walked back from Shinjuku Station to our hotel, stopping for an awesome lunch at a noodle shop on the way.  After a short rest, we left to join our friend Kathleen and her daughters, Meredith, age 11 and Isa, age 7) for dinner.  They have been living happily in Tokyo for the last two years. 

We went to a ninja-themed restaurant called Ninja-Akasaka (www.ninjaakasaka.com).

 The interior is dark, and the tables are all little private rooms connected by twisting passages and low bridges.  All of the staff members are dressed like ninjas, and jump around and act dramatic.  Kids are only allowed in from 5-7pm, so I think it is geared mostly toward Japanese adults.

Everyone managed to stay awake through dinner.  In a fit of epicurean daring, Zola even ate some tempura.  All four kids really liked the young magician ninja who came in to do tricks just before dessert.  Lu said: “That is ninja magic!”.  They threw us out promptly at 7pm, and the kids played tag on the broad sidewalk for 30 minutes while the adults talked.

By the time we got back to our hotel at 8:30, all four of us were feeling very tired.  Lu, in particular, kept saying “I just want to go to bed now. I just want to go to bed.”

Getting from the street to our room requires a change of elevators on the 41st floor.  When the doors opened into the sky lobby (where the busy bar and restaurant are), Lu burst into tears because she thought we were going out for another dinner, and that she would never get to her bed.  Soon enough, though, we navigated the elevators, got to our room, closed the blackout drapes, and collapsed.

Even though we didn’t really accomplish much, it felt like a busy day.  Tokyo is cool.  Let’s hope we start a little later tomorrow morning.