Day Three - Sunday 14 December 2014

Today we decided to visit central Tokyo - another dozen or so stops along the train line. This was a Sunday and the trains still came every few minutes and were as full as Melbourne peak hour. We managed to get seats this time though. And we discovered the seats are heated! Either that or the little Japanese schoolgirls who were sitting there previously had very warm bottoms. 

Our first destination was the Imperial Palace - which was rather a disappointment. You can only go into the Palace grounds one day a year - 23 December - the Emperor's  birthday. Instead we wandered around the outer gardens - very impressive but not quite what we were expecting. We gazed at some nice walls and gates and moats and the odd bridge. 

It was pretty cold but very sunny and it seemed some kind of fun run was in progress. Heaps and heaps of joggers everywhere and people in green jackets labelled "Palace Cycling Staff" cycling around. Not sure exactly what they were doing but they lived up to their name and cycled a lot. 

After this Jane went off to get her hair cut and the rest of us went back to Shinjuku to a real Japanese restaurant. 

We had bento box lunches - beautiful presentation, great service but I wasn't entirely sure what I was eating most of the time and can't say I really enjoyed it. It was certainly an experience though. 

We stopped off in the afternoon at a Coffee Art cafe called "Coffee Prince" - staffed by trendy boy band lookalikes, but very polite ones who still bowed to us when we left.
It was up on the 3rd floor of a building, as are lots of shops. As space is at a premium, lots of stores are on upper floors and advertise at ground level as 2F or 3F.  Took me a while to work out that meant 2nd Floor and 3rd Floor. 

I had a tapioca bubble tea and so did John - and the bubble tea art was quite impressive.

For dinner, I'm sorry to say, we hopped on a train and went back to Shinjuku to the Italian restaurant. 

It was excellent food. Pasta, pizza, octopus and mushrooms in garlic butter, fried yams (possibly not so Italian), Caesar salad, garlic bread and a glass of chianti. Delicious!