Arrival in Tokyo

It was concerning that the engine beside my window seemed to fail repeatedly just after take off. For a long time we did not climb and floated along limply at a few thousand feet.

I sought distraction in a programme listed as ‘experimental variety’ on the in-flight entertainment system. This Japanese game show featured a half dozen comedians locked in a restaurant. Their task was to guess the restaurant’s top 10 dishes with the catch that, each time they made a guess, the chosen dish would be cooked and they had to eat it before they could guess again.

In total they ate 25 dishes before they stumbled on the most popular 10. And that was the end of the programme. We had meanwhile gained altitude.

Here are the dishes they had eaten around half way through the challenge. The Japanese seem to do a mean line in generic brown sauce.

We whizzed through immigration and compulsory finger-printing and skipped onto a train to the centre of town. I needed a little rehydration which I obtained in the shape of this:

It was delicious.

We had to turn around quickly at the hotel because we were due to be met by the DAJF’s Tokyo representative who had decided to take us out for a pizza as an authentic welcome to Japan. It is hard to eat a pizza with chopsticks but I now know it can, in fact, be done.

Something I am not sure how to do is operate the loo in my hotel room. It has dials and squirters and when you sit down it starts to flush.