Oh boy. So confuse. Had a hard time posting because somehow I made a “page” and not a “post”. Computers sure do make the world better.

Sorry this is a little late. Another rainy day in Tokyo. It was a little chilly too, when it really started coming down. The morning started out OK and we met a fellow traveler from NY in the hotel elevator. Mariko and I went back to Grumpy’s (Hoshino Coffee) and this time I had the ham and cheese toast. It was even tastier than I expected (always a nice surprise).

We went to Takanawa Gateway since we were meeting Mariko’s friend there later in the day. Two days in a row I’ve had a celebrity sighting! This time it was Dr Yelllow, the elusive maintenance shinkansen! We saw Dr Yellow from the top of the Museum of Narratives. I had to look that up because it’s a very calming and huge (mostly empty) space and I keep thinking of it as the Museum of Nothing.

Takanawa Gateway is new and kind of upscale and the restaurants are pretty fancy. We took an easy out and had lunch at the museum café. I had the bean and beef something with a piece of bread that seemed to be missing the salt.

Mariko had the keema curry. Both were tasty.

More wandering and walked around the restaurant floors. It was called the Luftbaum and really looked to me like an upscale Rainforest Cafe. Hahaha. There were observation areas and we saw a nice grey view of the area.

We ended up a bokstore cafe with my sister’s friend and the scones were delicious.

For dinner we went to a curry restaurant on the Takashimaya restaurant floor. I took my poor sister on a huge detour because there’s an indirect underground passage and it was when it got cold and started pouring down rain. But we were able to make it to the department store and back with only a couple of blocks outside.

I had a “dinner set” which came with a drink (woo, non-alcoholic beer) and a bread bowl with two tablespoons of soup. That’s a regular size roll.

Mariko had a hamburg steak since you can’t get those easily in the US.

And this is just an example of many of my pictures. This is my left hand, trying to get my camera ready.

OK, my dinner. The half-and-half curry set. I had Indo curry and beef curry. A tiny salad and mango pudding. It was pretty good.

My dinner set also came with panna cotta and sherbet but I forgot to take a picture of that.

And I hope this goes up properly!

This is one of two full days Mariko has in Tokyo so we’re meeting her friends. Well, I’ve known them for a while so they’re not just acquaintances either. We started out the day at my favorite Hoshino coffee where I can get a fluffy pancake breakfast! There’s a second fluffy pancake under that egg and you can see sausages, a tiny salad, and a tiny yogurt as well. I call it Grumpy’s because one year there was a woman working there who did not seem to want to be there at all. She was very grumpy about her job and I even saw some young African-American men from NYC trying to make friends with her just to be friendly but she wasn’t having it. My sister’s friend’s daughter was there one of the days Grumpy was working and she deemed her to be terrifying. Hahaha.

I saw her once after work walking down the street with a guy and she was actually smiling!

On our travels through some of the areas away from the main stations, I saw an internet celebrity! (Actually, he’s also a Sunday Times bestseller.) He has a gruff personality online but he was incredibly nice in person.

Anyway, wandered through the backstreets, went to a temple, etc. Made our way to Meguro where we were meeting a friend at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum to see the Marimekko exhibit. But before that we went to a fish restaurant for their daily special, the aji fry with a scallop cream korokke. I quite enjoyed it. The miso soup was on the bland side but I liked the rest.

I didn’t take any pictures at the exhibit but I figure most of the people looking at this blog (you know who you are) know way more about Marinekko than I do. The museum was once the residence of Prince Asaka Yasuhiko and was as impressive as the display.

Afterwards we went back to Meguro station where we saw a tart shop. I had the seasonal fruit tart.

Mariko had the lemon tart and it wasn’t as good. Not lemony enough. A bit of the sourness would’ve been nice with how sweet it was.

After being so full of tart, we didn’t want to eat too much for dinner. We went to a restaurant in Keio but their dinner didn’t include the sandwiches they had at lunch so we just had a lemon squash each and went wandering. We wandered quite some time before we ended up at Royal Host, a chain family restaurant that has been around for years. It was one of the only family restaurants near me when I lived in Japan almost forty years ago! The fries were crispier than they looked and the club house sandwich, while a little dry, was quite tasty.

That’s it for the day!