John went off to Nagano to see snow monkeys, where we will going next week, so we took a slower day and tried to go museum hopping. I say tried, because it turns out that many of the big museums are closed between Christmas and New Years. So we walked through the Ueno park, which is a popular place to view cherry blossoms in the spring. It’s still quite pretty in the winter.
Ueno park
We ate fried squid from the street covered in kewpie mayonnaise, drank a warm soothing drink from a vending machine we are calling “honey bear lemon”, and strolled around a picturesque pond.
View from Park Hyatt bar
After the sunset, we decided we wanted a fancy drink with a view, so we went to the bar from Lost in Translation. It’s on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt, and looks out over the dense skyscraper core of shinjuku and the seemingly endless city. Very pretty, and very expensive. We had one excellent drink each, a Joie de Vivre for Ruth and a Beaver Malestrom for me, and moved on.
John returned from the monkeys with great photos and a desire for a bender. We went out searching for dinner and karaoke. We ate more squid at an izakaya with a grill on our table, which was almost as good as what we had in the park. Then it was karaoke time. The machine was hard to run with our incredibly limited Japanese, so Ruth and John stood outside another booth looking sad until the friendly after work party let them in. I stayed in our booth singing made up Japanese and eating cake for awhile, until they came to get me.
We started with a rousing Hotel California, some traditional Japanese ballads, and were finally defeated by a Queen medley. We fielded questions about our age, our country, and whether my hair is real (they were all impressed to learn that it is). Throats hoarse, we said goodbye to our friends and went in search for mcdonalds and sleep.
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