Well, everyone enjoyed their sleep in! And the girls had the opportunity to use the breakfast vouchers for a leisurely and traditional Japanese breakfast. Their verdict: “some of it was tasty, the rest was mid”.

The extra rest time did help reduce the swelling in my left foot, but Ross has worse pain today. We are tag-teaming our doing great/in pain moments at least 🤣 To aid us both, we decided to catch taxis at 10am (rather than trains with three line changes) over to Odaiba for some shopping at Aqua City. And to further aid us, I asked the hotel receptionist to tell the taxi driver where we were going before we left!

Our taxi had us there within 20 minutes! And we discovered a Starbucks in the centre so sat down for some real coffee mid-morning. Japanese culture frowns on eating and drinking while walking, so you either need to find seating or stand in the doorway of shops to finish your food/drink before you move on. The kids were able to find a few little souvenirs, and are ticking people off their list. This brought home to me that I have bought myself one fridge magnet, no souvenirs for anyone, and I am also acutely aware that after my strong start I still have several Christmas presents to buy and wrap 😬 “but anyway“, as our tour guide Sachi liked to say…..

After two hours exploring the waterfront shopping area (including discovering a random Statue of Liberty replica), we chose our own lunch adventure from the food court (some Japanese traditional meals, some burger and fries from Wendy’s), and caught two more taxis to TeamLab Planets, 10 minutes away. This is an immersive art installation museum which is very instagrammable.

We enjoyed two hours there exploring. It was great fun, and an experience that was different, although the whole time you had to be barefoot and occasionally walk through water, so we were thankful for the strong smell of chlorine, and also that the bandaid I gave Jess from my medical supplies held up 🤣

From there, taxis returned us to Shinjuku. I intended to take everyone to see Godzilla on the hotel building, but some of them didn’t know who Godzilla was (#parentingfail), so we headed straight to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building to visit their (free) observation deck on the 45th floor.

Next stop was exploring the streets of Shinjuku (many electronics shops and restaurants) on the way to Shinjuku train station. Now we thought we knew how to work the trains after our last adventure – we knew how to buy 8 tickets, and that we needed the green line. A station worker decided to help us and asked us where we wanted to go. When I answered “Akebonobashi station”, she nodded and sent us down many steps onto the red line.

Given I have struggled with making people understand me every single day, I decided not to question it and figured she knew better than me. When, six stops later, we arrived at Akebanebashi station, I realised I should have trusted my instincts!! We quickly swapped platforms and went back the six stops we had already travelled, found the green line and took the two stops to our local station 😬

Once back in our street, the others chose a dinner location from the many choices between the station and our hotel, while I started some laundry. Their choice was great – it was a Japanese/Chinese restaurant with extremely quick service and delicious food. Within minutes of ordering, the food arrived at the table. There were only three other tables of customers, all groups of 3-5 women. Reminded me of myself at home! 😉

My laundry load is still not dry, so I have encouraged the kids to get an early night ready for our next early start tomorrow while I keep feeding yen into the machine for an extra 30 minutes of drying. Hopefully it is dry now my diary entry is done 😉