Day 268, Tokyo, Japan
Mission coffee. Our first day in Tokyo, or anywhere for that matter, job #1 is to sort out our coffee situation. When I google-mapped coffee, it not only showed me cafes but vending machines close to my location–a gps that understands me.
A few steps from the front door, there is a vending machine that has canned coffee. The blue labels in the top row indicate cold beverages and the red labels on the bottom row means your can will be hot ones.
If you can make it down the block, there is a convenience store. This store has a cook in the back, who brings out fresh items out throughout the day. I think most of our neighborhood eat their meals from that place. But more importantly they have a machines that makes hot coffee, or bottled cold and hot coffee. I tried both. The hot cans are on a heated shelf that keeps them hot, shown here. That one on the right here is my little darling.
When we are interested in more of a cafe experience, we walk a couple of blocks to a cafe. We were excited to see that drip coffee isn’t uncommon here, everything isn’t entirely espresso based. The people were very helpful, once again.
There are bikes everywhere, which is great. Many people use this as a mode of transportation. You will see some bikes with one child seat, others have two. Very few of the bikes are locked in this part of town. They are parked everywhere, in front out houses, stores, cafes. They are obviously safe. Over the years we’ve had numerous bikes stolen which have been locked up or left for a minute. I appreciate how you can just park your bike here and know it will be where you left it in a few hours, overnight, or any length of time.
As we were walking through our neighborhood for the first time, I enjoyed seeing the Tori’s mixed into the urban landscape.
We can see the Tokyo Sky Tree from where we live, off in the distance.
After coffee we went to our grocery store.
Here was the popular, foot-long, root vegetable of the day which was apparently on sale. I really don’t know what it is, but everyone was grabbing one of these.
There were lots of interesting fish options.
The workers were putting together ready made meal packages.
All that hard work called for another coffee, this one with beignet.
In the afternoon, we met up with my cousin’s wife. They live here in Tokyo. When we left Turkey we mailed our winter coats to them so we wouldn’t need to cart them around southern Asia and Australia. She brought our coats and treated us to apple tea at the Metropolitan Hotel. She was extremely helpful with helping us plan what we might do in Tokyo. It’s nice to have family here!
This was the display in the Metropolitan Hotel in honor of Girls’ Day, which is tomorrow.
Later we went out for dinner to a restaurant, where we were partially successful. Still looking for a place close to our home where we can get noodles.