Goodbye Japan - Hello China

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Today is our last day in Tokyo... and it’s M’s birthday!!! Yesterday we took our clothes to the laundry (ah! the luxury of fresh clean clothes!) and took a walk around an area of Tokyo known for businesses managed my Italian and French ex-pats. It’s also a geisha district but to be honest we didn’t see any. Perhaps because it was raining and we did the walk in a rush. Then went to Ginza in a leap of faith to try and find some Okinawan tea (we bought it in London) but no one seems to know where we can find it!! Today just some last minute errands; buy breakfast for tomorrow (leaving at 7 am for Shanghai), lunch at a steak place (happy birthday babe!) which was delicious (Wagyu Beef) and arranging our suitcases. I am going to miss the many wonders of Japan: dogs in coats (and dyed hair!), ladies dressed in all sorts of costumes (doll, regency, multiple lace, high heels, wigs and a long etc), kind people offering to help us lost tourists, all the bowing, even the fact I haven’t been able to find one single place that sells SOAP FOR DELICATE CLOTHES aaarrrg! (why is it so difficult!!??), the trains’ unfailing punctuality, our local sushi (shouts of welcome! + thanks! as we come and leave), the mission to find a place for breakfast where they sell simple toasts and tea (no! I don’t want fish for breakfast thanks!), the impossibility to find fruit for sale (supermarkets or ‘food shops’ as they call them here are well hidden and only in residential areas), the multiples castles + temples + shrines _ Buddha’s and above all, the sense of uniformity, order and perfection that characterises everything in Japan: from their products and businesses to their people. Nonetheless, it will be good to watch some ‘English speaking channel’ (hopefully) in China, as although I’ve ‘enjoyed’ watching Tom Cruise and Jodie Foster’s Japanese alter egos, I’d still like to know what is actually being said. Mental note: get a hold of a Shanghai map with STREET NAMES in English. M has already found out how to get from the station to the hotel tomorrow. China here we come! More from there, thanks for reading us.
B & M xxx

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