Escaping Toyko

Our family is pretty into board games, and when I say that, I mean, one footlocker we brought to China was just games.   We also got into doing escape rooms together.  There aren’t any english escape rooms that we could find in China, but we did find two in Japan.  The first was Escape Tokyo I think.   When I booked the hotel I thought isn’t that convenient, it will be walking distance to the owl cafe and the escape room… and it was, but a long hot walk. By the time we got there, I was dying and I think we just barely made it before our time to start.

While in general, I applaud the efforts of the guys running the escape room, it wasn’t our favorite one by a long shot.  I won’t ruin it in case anyone else heads to Tokyo to escape, but some of the clues were ridiculously hard to figure out, and even after they were explained to us, we still weren’t quite sure how the one puzzle worked.

After our failed attempt to escape, we grabbed a Mister donut across the street and recuperated from the walk and running around in the escape room.    As we were leaving, we saw another group of the Mario go-kart Tour.

 

We needed to head to the main train station to buy our tickets to Osaka the next day, so we hopped on the metro and headed to Grand Central.

 

Leaving Grand Central after getting our tickets, we decided to walk to a famous spot in Tokyo, the Emperor’s palace. The walk there (while still really hot) was so lovely. Right next to the busy train station and shopping area was this peaceful little lake and there were two swans swimming around it.

Alex was having such a good time watching the swans it was hard to get him to keep heading to the palace.

The first views of the palace area, it may not look like it, but this is all surrounded by water too, but it’s covered in water lilies so thick that it looked like grass.

The gate way into the palace. There were more people here than I was expecting given the heat.   As soon as we got into the park, there were signs warning about heat stroke and directions to the air-conditioned hut to cool down. That was our first stop.   I was so hot, I couldn’t make it any farther, so I sat at the bottom of a hill and Alex and Mark went up to see the remains of the palace.   The pictures below were all taken by Mark.

After all this, we went back to the hotel to cool down and recuperate a bit (and on the way home clean glasses again)

We had one more place to eat in Tokyo, another Food Ranger recommendation, Ippudo. This was a really great ramen place, and i think my favorite place to eat in Toyko. it was nice because it was a big table that we shared with another family. The food was terrific, i had a spicy tofu based ramen and the gyoza were so amazing.

the other family did rock paper scissors at the end of the meal to decide who was going to pay, and we all laughed and smiled when the son lost and had to pay- and then the mom asked Alex to play. He lost but said we had to pay anyway.

Leaving the restaurant we met a group from China who asked Alex about himself and they lit up when he said he lived in China and knew Chinese. We ended our stay in Tokyo on a really high note, with tons of great memories. Early the next morning, we would leave for Osaka!!