Tokyo

November 2, 2025 from the itinerary: Day at leisure -S/G.

Today was my insurance day - a day off in case my flight was delayed so as not to affect the rest of the itinerary.

It started its a lovely Japanese breakfast.

I’m not sure I would want to eat jelly fish again, but now i can say I tried it once. It did not taste like chicken.

For those not familiar with Japanese toilets, here is a video of probably the best one I’ll have on this trip. Enjoy!

Since all my other plans for the day fell through, I ended up having a very fancy facial. My other plans included: Going to the Capibara Cafe and having coffee while playing with real Capibaras and going for a special Japanese 90 head massage session. This is something that appears to be only here and they were full. The Cafe was closed today.

I ended up going for a fmnacial at Dahmai and my “therapist’s” name was Mai.

It was the longest and most relaxing facial I’ve had and the second most expensive. Here are the highlights

-a very hot foot bath to which she added some sort of fizzing bubbles to “aid in circulation”. When she was giving my feet a bit of a rub she said that my feet are very tired - she had no idea….

-Probably some of the nicest massage cream I’ve experienced - very lush as she put it on.

-She put something in my hair which sounded like an aerosol but felt like ice when she massaged it through my hair and on my head.

The rest of the facial was pretty standard, but very relaxing and no blackhead removal.

This spa was in a quiet section of Tokyo which included several embassies and felt like Tokyo before WW2. In other words there were 2 story houses rebuilt to resemble the older style. There were several open air markets which were fun to walk through.

Now I had about 4 hours to kill until I met Sasha and Jake for an activity and a vegan dinner. I spent it preparing for tomorrow which will be the travel day from hell. More on that tomorrow. I also made a quick trip over to the Imperial Palace grounds (unfortunately the garden was already closed). It turned out this area was not far away from the famous “scramble” - the often seen photo of a million people crossing the intersection at once.

I hadn’t planned to see this, but on my way to the metro I passed some lost Americans. I continued to the station and at a crossing about a quarter mile further one of the American ladies asked me, in Japanese, for directions to the scramble. First I looked at her as though she was crazy and told her I don’t speak Japanese. Then I said I had no idea, but decided to check it out because it was so close. They were very lost and 5 minutes later I recommended they take the overhead sidewalk. They didn’t take my advice and are probably still looking for it.

I walked over to the train station to get my seat reservation for tomorrow’s bullet train and headed over to Shinjuku to meet Sasha/Jake.

Our activity was chopstick making. Somehow I managed not to cut myself and ended up with a reasonable set of chopsticks which I paid another Y1500 to have customized.

Dinner was a half mile walk through interesting areas to a place called Heavenly Pancakes - a fully vegan restaurant.

While the food was good, this was a bit of a fiasco as it took 45 minutes to get drinks and over and about 90 minutes after this to get food. We thought we’d be smart and order dessert when our meal came, but we were still waiting when the announced last call for food orders. Here is the raspberry champagne (and beer). Sasha had an appetizer sampler, I had rice tacos and Jake something that looked like chicken fingers. We split pancakes for dessert, which was rather disappointing- the fluffy pancakes we expected tasted like heavy US biscuits.

Turns out Jake came in from Australia last night and we all just missed each other at Haneda - oh well, a lost opportunity.

The trip back to the hotel was uneventful except I did need a toilet not long after arriving. Seems this vegan food went quickly through my system…. Thank goodness for the fancy toilets!