We wake up early, or Joe, Maylin and I wake up early. Téa sleeps. Téa sleeps a looooong time. Téa sleeps through breakfast noises in a very cramped space, and does not move. Téa is burning up. Téa has a fever…
We chase Téa into the “bedroom” so we can close the sliding door and transform the sofabed back into a sofa. We let her sleep another 30 minutes or so, and then make her get up and eat and drink a little something, and take some of the children’s medication we got for Maylin yesterday. After a bit, Téa feels good enough to at least try to come exploring for the day, with the open option that her and mom would return to the apartment if she didn’t feel up to it.
We set out for Shinjuku, hoping to get a couple of big sights in before the predicted rain this afternoon. The first thing we meet, is a robotic tourist information in the subway station. Joe decides to test it out, and attempts to have a Q&A session with The Thing.
By the time we stop playing with the robot in the station, we make our way to a place for lunch. We try a couple of places, but most decent restaurant (ie: food that would entice Joe and myself) have only counter seating, which we tried for ramen dinner that one night, and it really doesn’t work well for our family. We end up finding a place called Jonathan’s, and it reminds me a lot of Denny’s, except for the servers here are also ROBOTS!
Lunch was ok, both girls opted for pizza options, I had tonkatsu (fried pork with cabbage salad and soup) (but Joe ate my soup), and Joe ate a pasta option that came with two side orders. He chose ice cream for both of his side orders, so both girls got dessert. My meal was not very big seeing as my soup ended up in Joe, so we ended up ordering a 3rd ice cream. Téa felt right as rain after lunch, and the fever did not return. All is well that ends well!
After lunch we walked around Shinjuku and came upon a familar face, poking his head over a building! The Godzilla head is famous, and of course there are Godzilla plushies and stickers and all sorts of souvenirs flooding the area surrounding this landmark.
On our way to the other BIG sight we wanted to see in Shinjuku, we stumbled upon a Game Station. Imagine floor upon floor upon floor upon floor of gachapon machines (the ones where you put your coin in, twist the knob to release your prize, and dance a happy dance when you see which version you got), claw machines (you know the ones, they’re rigged against you, you aim really hard, you release the claw, it grabs your prize, and then drops it on its way to the prize chute) and video games. The girls could not stop grinning, and many a coin went into many machines this day. We walked away with a couple of cute prizes, and lots of fun memories.
When we decided to walk on towards our next stop, it had started raining. Not just a little rain, the type of rain that floods certain parts and make it on the news across the world, type of rain. But we didn’t know that at the time. We just saw a wall of rain, and luckily there was a subway station right across from the entrance to the Game Station. We hopped into the station, which is an intricate network of underground tunnels, stores, restaurants, stores, vending machines, stores and a grocery store. Did I mention stores? You could do all your shopping down here and never see daylight. We grabbed some groceries, went home to cook, and spent the rest of the day relaxing in our AirBnb.
