First proper day in Japan for my mum, as yesterday’s trauma of getting from the airport obviously didn’t count! Managed to negotiate a later checkout for free, and so we emerged into the world at 11am. Leaving our bags at the hotel front desk, we went for a morning coffee/cup of tea, and then jumped on the metro over to Roppongi for a nice bit of lunch. We went for more Katsu at a place called Imaka, mums first Japanese meal, and it was lovely! I had chicken Katsu and mum had pork, and we shared some curry sauce on the side.

After that, we went off to explore the Imperial Palace gardens… Which of course were shut, which seemed depressingly predictable by now. Why was nothing going smoothly 😞 We had a look around the outside and the fish swimming around in the moat were beautiful!

We then headed back to the hotel to pick up our bags and carry them to the next place we were staying, which was a modern designer ryokan in the north of Tokyo, near Minowa station. It was so so hot and humid outside, around 37C, it made it very difficult to transport the bags across Tokyo, and so we ended up going from aircon to aircon spot inside the station to try and cool down momentarily. Mum looked like she was melting, no real surprise there. When we arrived, we were shown to our little room on the third floor with tatami and futon, aircon and shared showers and bathrooms on each floor. The aircon had not been switched on so it was about 30C inside the room! We promptly left to go and cool down. The staff offered us a complementary jacuzzi visit as they have one inside the premises. Mum immediately signed up for it, and I mentioned my surprise at this to her, as she had spent the last 3 hours complaining about being hot and yet signing up for a hot bath?! Turned out she didn’t realise it would be hot, so we promptly cancelled our reservation! We also found some adverts for the 2020 Olympics… Good luck Tokyo! Hope it goes better than Rio!

l took mum on an evening tour of central Tokyo, when it was just starting to rain. We first went to Akihabara and looked around there until mum got overwhelmed by all the electronics(!) we also visited Harajuku for a brief wander round, before we went to Shibuya and across the big busy pedestrian crossing, which was quite weird to see from under an umbrella. Finally walked to Shinjuku and found a cheap and cheerful ramen place, called Udon: Mentsu Dan. Lovely udon noodles, nice broth, and 200 yen for two glasses of ice cold draft beer? Onto a winner I think! By the time we got back to the hotel, the room was lovely and cold, and we had a great night’s sleep, ready to go to Utsunomiya in the morning!