Backpacking

We found a cheese shop and our weeks long cheese dearth cleaned them out of their free samples. We bought some Camembert and a bottle of red wine as a thank you present to Tak's family for putting us up (putting up with us?) for so long, and on leaving the shop, we found night had artificially fallen, and the fake blue sky had turned purply blue with stars. Only in Japan!

The real sky had also turned dark (well, as dark as Tokyo light pollution allowed) and headed back to the beach for a night view across the bay, then onto Shibuya for yet another enjoyable izakaya.

On the way back on the tube, we had another freaky coincidence befall us. Sam, the American geezer we had met in the hostel in Kyoto, happened to walk into our carriage (in all the carriages in all the trains in all of Tokyo, he had to walk into ours...). Bizarre!

On getting back, it was close to midnight and so near Emma's birthday. We readied the card August and I had made on the way to the airport, detailing each of us with the object we were most associated with (and a huge luminous green octopus with legs missing, cause Tak ate them), and we crept in to present it to her brandishing a beer each. It was a nice moment, arranged enthusiastically by Tak-san,

and we remarked on the fact that if it hadn't been on Emma's insistence to be in Tokyo for her birthday, we would no longer be in Japan.

Day 29: 28th February The Twist in the Tale

Tokyo, Japan

After two weeks of salivating over plastic food displays outside restaurants, we decided to undertake a pilgrimage to an area of Tokyo dedicated to selling restaurant goods, including lanterns, neon signs , waiter/waitress dress and of course plastic food. Tak bought some bowls and soba trays for home (so all you guys - get over there for some Japanese cuisine) and the rest of us predictably bought chopsticks after weeks of perfecting the art of eating with sticks. I can imagine Danbo right now tucking into a salad with chopsticks.

I fell in love with a t-shirt with the beckoning Chinese characters of "Ramen" - I had been mercilessly hunting the streets for that sign for a while now - but unfortunately Japanese large "one size fits all" was never going to fit my beer hulk.

Staring at plastic food displays had made us hungry (it might be hard to believe, but the food looks incredibly authentic, it's an art form),