Soothing dappled light 
The sweet sip of golden tea
Honoured ritual

We checked out of our hotel by 8. 30 this morning and headed straight to the station. We checked our bags into a coin locker for ¥700 each and gave ourselves one last day in this pulsating city.

Time for breakfast at one of the many coffee shops at the station.  We chose Dean and Deluca, gotta be good. It had a gourmet store and bakery vibe. Ken had a fruit and nut loaf and I had had a chocolate danish. They were both very good. Everywhere we have ordered coffee and Ken has had an espresso and me a latte, he gets a china cup and I get a takeaway. 

We bought our reserved tickets for our trip out to Narita this evening. We are learning from our mistakes and are now fully organised.

Since we were at the station, we thought we would jump on a train. We went to the Ryogoku Station and walked to the Hokusai Museum. It was an uninteresting walk, but not too long. The museum is a gallery dedicated to Hokusai, a very famous Japanese artist, from this Sumida City area.  There were some lovely pieces, he has a lot of woodblock art and manga drawings. It is a small but nice gallery, it shows the processes of the artist. He had published many books showing drawings of almost everything. We spent a bit of time in the bookshop looking at those and Ken bought a one-line drawing book.

We had a much nicer walk back to the station. Sometimes using google means you miss out on the aesthetics. This was a tree lined street with some hotels and commercial offices. Stopping at a 711 for a cold drink, we went for the slushie experience. You buy a cup of frozen fruit and then it goes into the slushie machine and is blended up into a delicious drink. Very Japan. 

 We passed the large Sumo Stadium, there was some sort of tournament on but all the day tickets were sold. The stadium is very close to the station and there were a lot of large sumo men dressed in their robes and obe with their hair pulled back walking to and from the venue.

Back on the train to Shinjuku and another walk through the part of the city, back to the Shinjuku Goyen National Garden to visit the Rakuu-tei Tea House. It is set in a beautiful garden with trees forming a natural enclosure. Shoes off and we ordered our tea and mochi - white peach for Ken and fresh fig and rare cheese for me. We stepped into the tea room onto tatami mats and waited for our tea to be served. It was a lovely room with shoji screens, large windows overlooking the gardens and a calm atmosphere. Our tea came in large pottery cups and our mochi on wooden plates. They were big, sticky and very tasty. We have enjoyed the roasted green tea while we have been here, with a nutty, warm flavour.

Out onto the street for a couple of hours before our train left. We rambled along Shinjuku Rambling Rd, full of shops and shoppers. We attempted Don Quixote again and left again, looking for the Cosme cosmetic store. It was hidden in the station shopping precinct. I bought something there and then we checked out some of the other stores in the area. We found a curry place, Ken hadn’t had his katsu curry yet, so we ordered a little lunch on the computer screen before going into the shop. It was a pretty good curry.

Ken wanted to see the Godzilla shop so we walked in that direction, as we had half an hour to kill. The store wasn’t very exciting, not sure I get the Godzilla thing.

We walked our final steps in Tokyo town and retreived our cases from the lockers. A very easy process, and much better than trying to go back to the hotel. We had thought about doing the luggage delivery service, but the same day one didn’t recognise our hotel at Narita. The lockers were easy anyway.

Into the station for the last time, we found the JR line and the Narita Express platform. A short wait andwe were soon in the comfortable seats whizzing out of the city. The train was quite busy, Ken put his suitcase up above us and mine in the luggage rack at the front of the carriage. There were a few people with big bags of tax free cosmetics. Our tax free shopping is all in Ken’s suitcase, hopefully it will all be ok. We passed the suburbs and then a more rural landscape, pretty pastel houses glowed in the twighlight. There were rice fields and finally back into more buildings and we were at the Narita Airport. We thought we were getting off at terminal 1(that’s where we’re flying from), but Ken googled our hotel and it looked closer to the 2/3 stop, so we got off there. 

Google said a 12 minute walk, easier than finding the shuttle, right? But google was a right shit tonight. We started out ok, nobody else was walking, but we like to walk. Then we were directed to walk along the road where the buses were going. We tried to go around, Ken dragged the suitcases up stairs and down stairs and then we had to walk through the bus carpark. That got us back onto the bus highway for a while. There was an escalator going back up to terminal 3 (we hadn’t made any real progress) so we went in there and came out again. We saw the bus stands, I thought our hotel shuttle was number 25, but number 25 at terminal 3 is not a hotel shuttle. Ken called the helpline machine and he said we needed to be at number 25 -  terminal 2. So I called it - we got a taxi. Our first of the trip. 

Finally we were at our hotel. We got checked in, bought beer from the vending machine and I ordered a club sandwich from room service. I had bought little basque cheesecakes at the station, so we had those for dessert and tucked in for an early night.