We had a difficult night sleepwise and finally gave up around 5:00 am. We met Jan and Tom for breakfast at 8:00 and the buffet was packed and chaotic. We may have to go earlier tomorrow. We were scheduled to meet at 9:40 for our tour departure. It took nearly 10 minutes to get the elevator down to the meeting room. We ended up catching one going up in order to get down. We learned there are nearly 400 Regent cruisers here now which explains a lot. We left for our bus and departed the hotel around 10:15. Our guide was kind, but not the best and sometimes a little hard to understand. We went over to Odaiba where we saw the Tokyo Statue of Liberty (there are 4 here in Japan) and enjoyed the views over the river back to downtown Tokyo. We realized that we were very near the hotel where we stayed in 2017 when we spent a few days here after a Princess cruise. I believe I have this same photo from that trip.
Along the way, we passed a LegoLand with this huge giraffe out front, made of Legos of course.
And this notice on a car caught my attention.
If you blow it up, you'll see it says "Rabbits on Board". Different.
Next stop on the tour was to the Ginza shopping district. We're not really into all the luxury brands, so we sort of just walked around. Michael's suitcase had 2 of its 4 wheels torn off during the trip over, so we looked for a replacement. The only one we saw that might have worked was $695. Seemed like a lot to spend to have its wheels torn off after a few trips, so we passed. The Ginza reminded me of Rodeo Drive, another place I don't ever need to see again. As I walked around in my Costco shirt and pants, it occurred to me that I'm definitely not their target customer.
We were back at the hotel by 1:30 and got some advice from the front desk on where we might find a suitcase that didn't cost quite so much. So we took the hotel shuttle to the nearby Metro/bus station and went to an indoor mall where we found just the thing we needed. Mission accomplished, we headed back to the hotel for a little rest, as we're still a bit jetlagged. We didn't actually sleep though so as not to disrupt another night.
And on our way back to the shuttle, we passed this. We have Shake Shack on the East Coast, but I don't know if this is the same chain.
For dinner, we went with Tom and Jan to Denny's, of all places! It's about a 5-minute walk from the hotel and we had a fun experience at a Denny's the last time we were here. This time it was a different experience, but fun again. We had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated and then we were each given 3 menus with about 5 more at the table. The English language was in tiny print hidden within the Japanese characters, but there were pictures of everything. You order from a tablet device at the table and that took us a while to figure out, of course. We ordered for each of us individually which meant that Jan's food starting coming out before we had finished with Michael's. But we did get better as we went along. Jan and Tom had "hamburger steaks" that looked a little gray, so they weren't sure what type of meat it was. I had raw tuna and a noodle soup which was pretty good and Michael had chicken jambalaya - a rather eclectic assortment. Anyway, we figure it's good for our old brains to have to figure these things out.
After that, it was back to the hotel and another early night.
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