Tokyo starts to reveal her charms

(This is our first day in Tokyo and is out of sequence (sorry) - the wifi here isn't very good so we thought this has uploaded already!)

We took a walk around the neighbourhood to grab a coffee and get a feel for the lie of the land.

Tokyo quickly starts to show us a different side to the drab architecture. In the city centre, there is an ordered cacophony, a choreographed kaleidoscope of sites and sounds. 

Bright coloured signs and neon lights adorn the buildings. Taxis silently glide around, their doors opening without even a rearward glance by the driver. Road workers nod in profuse apology and gratitude for having held up the traffic. When the coffee shop we visit realises we're sitting outside, they wait for two seats side by side, politely placing little reserved signs on the table for us and ushering is inside. You certainly don't get that in London!

By night the spectacle increases, the neon becomes more apparent. The locals have come out to play! We visit a "dive bar"...where the bar tender swiftly and efficiently shows us to an empty table and then asks us in near faultless English if he can please cheers with us. We acquiesce to his demands (it means "yes") (and that's a Pirates of the Carribean joke not a language lesson, but I digress).  

Suddenly our quiet little bar man is standing on a chair screaming at us in Japanese. Either he's seen a huge mouse or he has terrible PTSD...or actually this is just the most animated "cheers" we've ever heard. Either way, he calms down and seems pleased with us, so at least he wasn't screaming at us.

You fly to the other side of the world and come across a giant billboard of one of England's finest (and as Rich is keen to point out - one of the Midlands' finest).

It is not clear what Jess Ennis-Hill wants to charge the Japanese with...a javelin? A crime? For buying too many Adidas trainers? Or is this just another example of a slogan that has been "lost in translation"? Apparently the purpose of the campaign is to inspire female athletes. This begs two questions - when is the campaign manager being sacked, and what sports can you play in towering high heels, because you don't see many Japanese women in trainers!

We tried a variety of food in our dive bar - dumplings, tempura...but more on these culinary discoveries later!

Clare would like to thank you all for the texts about consumption of sushi - unfortunately the sushi count remains at zero, but the texts have made her first 24 hours sans sushi a lot more bearable.