Thursday, January 12, 2024

• Woke up facing another logistics day – changing hotels from Ikebukuro to Shibuya.
• Started off back at the post office, where we mailed another box of goodies back home – for comparison, we paid extra for the airmail service, so we could try to work out if it would be worth it on future trips. Spoilers – absolutely worth the extra cost.

• We didn’t really work out a good solution for having added a third suitcase (after I bought one in the previous few days), so we just took all three…. on peak hour Yamanote line trains between two very busy stations. Ooops.
• We had also done a little less research into our Shibuya hotel than all of the others, resulting in a hotel that was up a steep hill and on the other side of construction around Shibuya Station, meaning to walk with three suitcases to find the hotel was a bit of an epic trek. Google Maps also routed us through the yet-to-be-opened Shibuya Sakura Stage building, which was still under construction itself. Double ooops.
• The trifecta of bad decisions came when I stepped off the train in Shibuya (with two suitcases, my backpack and a giant tote bag containing our room fan), realised mid-step that the person exiting the train ahead of me had stepped off and decided to stop dead to get their bearings in the doorway, and twisted my ankle attempting not to squash them flat.

• We dropped out baggage at the hotel and went for a (slow and gentle) wander about Shibuya until it was time to check in. We found a tiny homestyle restaurant for a delightful ramen and a katsu curry for MBW, spent an hour singing some karaoke, and checked out a paint supply store we found.

• Explored into the evening, stopping at our second Nikujiru Gyoza DanDaDan for dinner, which remains very tasty and excellent value.