Paul’s birthday today.

The day started with me finding out there are work issues I have to deal with, so that wasn’t very nice. We went for breakfast at Dean & Deluca in the station overpass. It was OK, but nothing fantastic. I went back to the hotel to try to work out what’s going on, while Kaoru took Paul and Lyn to the supermarket near Toyoko-Inn, that we normally shop at. I got things partly sorted, and then we needed to head out – it would be raining later in the day so we wanted to do what we could before that happened.

We left the hotel about 12.30 and went to Shinjuku. Naturally we had to go and see the Godzilla Hotel. We then went to lunch at the ramen restaurant Kenichi took us to on our last trip – Takahashi. Because it was quite late, we were able to get a table. Then it was back on the streets to Don Qiote, and then a train ride to the Shinjuku government building. We went up to the 45th floor observation deck, which luckily wasn’t very busy at all. We were able to have a really good look out all of the windows from the free deck, rather than paying to go to Tokyo Tower or Skytree. Unfortunately because it was cloudy we could see Mount Fuji, but we could definitely see how large Tokyo is.

We caught the train back to our hotel. I came back to try to deal more with issues, and Kaoru took Paul and Lyn in to the station for some more looking at food, and maybe a drink.

Kaoru came back to the room, and then at 7.15 we met to go for dinner. There was a little bit of rain, which made things annoying, but we had been expecting it for a while, so in reality we were really lucky it hadn’t come earlier. We went across the train tracks into Shinagawa and tried to go to a Yukiniku restaurant, but the one Kaoru was looking for could not be found. We ended up at an Izakaya, but unfortunately there were smokers inside – a loud table of Korean’s chain smoking, and somebody near the door with a giant cigar. So it wasn’t the best experience.

I bought some more food at the convenience store, and an ice cream (and, of course, a bottle of sake) and we went back to Paul and Lyn’s room for a bit. Then we returned and went to bed.