Japan 2026

 October 16, 2026 Going home. Today is a full day (and a half) of travel.  Our flight leaves Tokyo at 6:30-ish (pm), so we have all morning before getting picked up at 2:00. We're taking no chances with Tokyo traffic. At breakfast, there was a robot bussing tables. (The robots that Red Chili used to use delivered food to tables.) Later, we decided to make a run out to the 7-Eleven for snacks. Walter was on the hunt for frozen margarita pizza. He read a review from someone who said it was the best margarita pizza, so he had to give it a try. There are no microwaves in the room, but there was one off the main lobby. So here we are tearing it open with dozens of people walking by. Walter's verdict: "not bad, definitely better than the mystery meat at dinner last night." Last week I started writing some thoughts about Japan and couldn't finish them as the trip got into full swing. This seems like a good time to finish them off. I was going to call this blog post: ...

October 19, 2026  Our second full day of tourists. We did a lot of walking. I ran Strava, the fitness app on my phone, the fitness app on my watch until the battery died, so I only have estimates. Here are the data on Strava, but it include the subway rides so it is an over-estimate: https://www.strava.com/activities/20645036502 But you can see the map of where we were.  The fitness app on the phone says I walked 9.86 miles for a total of 22.784 steps. This is probably the best estimate. Our guide, Kayee, showed up before 9:00 again and we took the subway across town to visit the Kokyo Gaien National Garden, home of the Imperial Palace. On more than one occasion, Kayee had to rethink which subways to take in order to get to our destinations.  Subway cars don't have much advertising on them and definitely no graffiti, so it was unusual see this on the cars of one train. This is one of the professional baseball teams in Japan, the Saitama Seibu Lions.  The number of ha...

 October 18, 2026 This was our first day in Tokyo.  The Metropolitan had a huge breakfast buffet. Mike was a happy camper. They even had a map. At 9:00 we met our guide in the lobby. Her name is Kayee and she is from Hong Kong. We traveled to our destinations on the subway and even a local had trouble getting the right tickets for the right train from these kiosks. Turns out the subway system utilizes trains from multiple companies. They are not a unified system like NYC (now, at least - NYC at one point used have multiple subway companies). That makes things a little complicated. One thing I found curious was that you could rent a locker in the subway station. That used to be a favorite terrorist tool. Our first stop was the National Museum. Pictures don't really do justice to the beauty of the art, but here's one to prove we were there.  There were a few of these scrolls that were 30 (?) feet long. I found the explanatory boards helpful. This one substantiated the labor...