September 24: Last full day in Japan

Today was a day for winding down and easing our way back into post-vacation life. As a result, we planned to take it easy and just do a few things, while still putting in our daily miles. After all, we're going to be spending 16 hours on airplanes tomorrow and we've consumed a lot of delicious calories during the past couple weeks..

Given the trouble we'd had finding places that were open for breakfast and that also provided Japanese-style breakfast rather than imitation Western food, we decided to try out the hotel's buffet. It proved to be a really good choice: the hot table included broiled fish, chicken scrambled in egg, sweetened omelettes, French fries, a stir fry of mushrooms and tofu, plus a tureen of miso soup. For the cold table, there were three types of sweet pickles, nori (seaweed), seaweed salad, and two types of fruit salad. Also some white bread products that we both ignored. Last but not least, all the coffee one could want.

Suitably stuffed, we headed upstairs for an e-mail check, then headed out on our day. First stop was at the Shitamachi Museum, at the end of Ueno park nearest the train station. Outside the museum, two young women were playing modern music, ranging from folksy to rocky, on a traditional Japanese three-stringed instrument, the s(h)amisen. We stayed to watch them for several songs, and they were good. The instrument seems to be played like a cross between a slide guitar and a fret-less banjo. One one finger of her uppermost hand, the one near the neck of the instrument, the musician uses a ring on one finger to slide up and down the strings to control their length and both the note and how it quavers, while her other fingers pluck the strings. Down at the body end of the instrument, she also plucked strings. But rather than using a pick or a tough fingernail, she uses something that looked rather like a hairbrush, presumably with a pick on its underside. (Just looked it up: it's called a "plectrum".) Interesting fusion of old and new!

The museum provides an excellent reconstruction of the state of Tokyo at the turn of the last century, for the periods spanning the decades before and after the 1923 earthquake and subsequent fire that killed more than 100 thousand people and destroyed large parts of Tokyo. (The fires were worse than they otherwise might have been because the quake struck at lunch, when most people had kindled fires to cook their lunch.) We were met by a charming volunteer, who took us through the reconstruction, telling us many details of daily life of the time. (Including useful things you never hear about in most tours or histories, such as the toilet and kitchen locations, and the fact that the people of the time had developed a handy hand wash station outside the toilet: a bucket filled with water and suspended at head height, with a hole in the bottom stoppered by a small stick. Poke the stick upward, and water flows down from the bucket so you can wash your hands. Pull it down when you're done to close the hole and retain the remaining water.

The only real drawback of the museum is that our guide had to remain on the first floor to help other English visitors, and most of the upstairs exhibit space, which showed Tokyo's reconstruction during the next half century, was not translated.

From the museum, we wandered over to the lake that takes up a substantial portion of the southwestern end of Ueno Park. It's filled with lotus plants, which rise out of the water to nearly head height, and stretch several hundred feet to the far side of the lake, where there's a pleasant pagoda. At the southern end, there's enough open water for small fish, a few larger fish, and a fleet of turtles. We watched them for a while, as they've clearly learned to hang out in hope of handouts. There were at least two species of turtle, include the red-eared turtle familiar to most North Americans as a childhood pet. Some of these guys had been around quite a while; they were nearly a foot across.

For lunch, we went to a brewpub that made or sold a variety of Tokyo craft beers. Unfortunately, they were out of the imperial stout and "real ale" that we'd been hoping to try, but their YoHo Ale and summer orange ale (a typical red) were both good, and went well with a savoury bowl of soba noodles and chunks of roast duck.

From there, we headed over to the Ameyoko shopping arcade right next to Ueno station (indeed, it runs under the tracks in places), both to graze on anything that looked interesting and just see all the weird stuff people sold. Plus, people watching, as it was Sunday, and everyone plus their cousins was out for a stroll.. The Japanese don't seem to be big on eating out for breakfast, but are big on lunch and dinner in restaurants, particularly when combined with shopping, so the arcade was packed with people. There's an amazing amount of stuff for sale, from high-end clothing to cheap tat, not to mention a bewildering variety of food—ranging from the expected sweet shops and stalls selling skewers of fresh-cut fruit to fish markets. Interestingly, several shawarma restaurants, which were also selling hand-churned Turkish ice cream. We sampled some dry fruits, shared a green tea ice cream, and shared a chewy fish-shaped cookie (taiyaki) covered in caramelized sugar, possibly with some maple in it.

We lasted until about 3 before the noise and fuss wore us out, and headed back to the hotel to put our feet up and recuperate before dinner. After a bit of research, we found a tempura place about 20 minutes from the hotel that looked promising. We've been using Google Maps on Shoshanna's phone to navigate when a location wasn't perfectly clear, and though it got us to the okonomi place the previous night, it led us a bit astray tonight. We did eventually find tempura place, but the restaurant reviews neglected to mention that it only sold shrimp and prawn tempura—not at all my thing. But they did have a few other dishes, of which I selected a bowl of sweet pickles (cabbage, cucumber, turnip, daikon, and onion) and a big plate of eggplant sautéed in a thick black sauce similar to, but better than, hoisin sauce. Since they offered a new beer we hadn't seen before, we tried it: Asaha Extra Dry Black. Not my favourite black beer, but a nice change from the lagers et al. that we've been having most of the time.

We wandered home through a busy shopping area, still packed with people at 8 PM, though less crowded than earlier, with brief stops to explore a local supermarket, restock our dwindling chocolate supply, and get an ice cream for dessert.

Tomorrow is our last day in Japan, and we really only have the morning. We'll wander over to a local crafts museum, possibly check out a shopping area that specializes in cooking supplies, and maybe wander through Ueno park. Probably have one last meal before shouldering our packs and heading to the airport for our flight home. Stay tuned!

September 25: Travel home From Tokyo

One last buffet breakfast at the hotel, and it was as good as the previous day, plus there were a few new things (fried noodles, roasted rather than fried potatoes). Then back up to the room for near-final packing. "Near final" in this case meaning that we were going to be hauling a ton of baggage later in the day, and it was both sunny and hot, so by the time I got to Haneda Airport, I figured I'd be swimming in sweat, and would want to change into new clothing. Also, some fragile stuff that was fine to leave in the big backpacks while we were walking to and between trains would not survive Air Canada's baggage handlers.

We left our bags with the hotel's left-luggage people, then walked about 45 minutes to the Asakuse Taito City traditional crafts museum. (It would have taken half that time if we just walked, but we were irresistibly pulled into a bunch of kitchen supply stores and other distractions. Reminded me of my undergraduate days, when I used to hit the bargain Chinese import shops for cups and plates, and so on, only with much higher quality. It would be a lot of fun equipping an apartment from these stores. Interestingly, the shops seemed to cluster in mini-districts: for example, half a dozen kitchen stores side by side, followed by three knife stores, followed by a handful of slipper stores, and so on. No idea whether they're cooperatively owned or managed so that they don't compete or whether there's some complex etiquette of coexistence that prevents knife duels on the sidewalk.

The crafts museum was more a showroom than a museum, but showed off many beautiful crafts that Japan is known for—lacquerware, ceramics, fabrics—and some perhaps that it's not known for, such as worked leather that looked like carved wood, including a purse that looked sufficiently like a log that it even had annual growth rings on its two ends and a "carved" leather owl. No volunteer guides, only two small floors, and minimal English signage, but they did have a looped movie that showed some of the techniques. Worth the walk, particularly if you're in Asakuse District, as a low-pressure museum for our final day.

From the museum, we headed off to the Sumida River and Tokyo Sky Tree, which is like their version of Toronto's CN tower. The river is thoroughly domesticated, with concrete banks and no wildlife, and the Sky Tree is interesting but not worth much time, so we quickly turned back inshore. As we were passing through one of the older temple districts, a trio of young Japanese (one woman and a man) bearing a movie camera asked if they could interview us. We were in no hurry, and agreed. The questions were completely off the wall (about dental hygiene and whether we'd ever had hangovers, and what herbal or other medicines we took to cure the situation). But they were polite and enthusiastic, so why not? When they were done, they asked us to sign a typical model release form—for NTV, which (if memory serves) is Japan's national TV network. No idea what this was about, other than that it might be one of those "weird things those weird foreigners do" TV shows.

It was a hot and thirsty day, so we went in search of beer. We found two new ones—in one of those ubiquitous vending machines this time—and tried them out when we got back to the hotel lobby. The first, Yebisu Premium Black, was a delicious black ale. The second beer was from the Sapporo company, and that was the only English on the can. But from the autumn leaves in the image and the year 2017 prominently displayed beside them, it seems likely it was an Oktoberfest ale. Not as good as the Yebisu, but still tasty and reinvigorating on a hot day. All the mass-market beers from Japanese brewers are good, particularly as a restorative on hot days, but they're starting to produce some more interesting offerings that we look forward to sampling next time. And thus far, I've liked the Yebisu beers best.

We headed back to Haneda Airport on the relentlessly efficient Japan Rail, repacked our bags to move the breakable into our carry-on luggage, and then I went to change into some dry clothes. We'd hoped to rebook to an earlier flight from Toronto to Montreal, but after 45 minutes waiting in line to see an agent and check our bags, the agent told us she couldn't change our tickets. It might have gone faster if instead of having 2 ticket agents and 4 agents working together to reposition the lane markers leading to the counter, they'd reversed that ratio. We had plenty of time before our flight, so it was more irritating than problematic.

We figured it would be a while before Air Canada fed us, so we stopped for a last Japanese meal before boarding. More on the fast food side of the quality scale than most places we'd eaten, but acceptable for airport food. I had beef curry with rice, and it was nicely spiced, though oversalted; Shoshanna had noodles with pork and shrimp, though the shrimp were on the homeopathic side in terms of size and quantity. If there are "jumbo shrimp", then these were "microshrimp", and they were probably dried rather than fresh.

And so (probably) ends our Japan blog, as we're writing this in Toronto Airport, waiting for the last leg of our flight home. I might have time for some musings in a couple days once I've gotten caught up on accumulated responsibilities—or earlier if I need an excuse to avoid those responsibilities.

Thanks for sticking with us thus far!