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We started out late because we’re really tired. Don’t know if it’s the long travel day yesterday or a cumulative effect.

We had ‘blunch‘ at ‘Quick Detour’ a small quick serve restaurant near the hotel. Don’t have a specific itinerary yet today, so we’re going to stop and figure things out at a nearby Starbucks. Starbucks here seems very much like at home, complete with free wifi. We noticed at our Quick Detour restaurant they had a separate smoker’s room. I don’t see smoking on the street, but we did see another area outside of a building cordoned off where they had ‘smokers in jail’.

We’ve seen a number of vending machines along the sidewalks.

Driving is apparently right hand drive, as it is in Hong Kong. I understood why it was so in Hong Kong with the British presence, but not so much here.

It’s partly sunny here. No rain. While walking around on our way down a small street about a block off a main road, we see some small residences.

We’ve stopped in an area of Tokyo called Minato City. The green patch in the center of the map are the Imperial Gardens and Palace.

We eventually made our way  via the subway over to the Imperial Gardens /Palace, though the grounds were closed at the time. The gardens and palace are protected by a ~20 stone wall and a moat..

While walking around the outer bounds of the gardens, a Japanese man walked up an presented my wife with a small handmade origami swan. The gardeners were out trimming the pine trees in the park around the gardens.

Of course, no visit to a major city would be complete without making another stop on the HWT. We made two today! The main store is on the Ginza and is seven stories.

We took the Ginza line on Tokyo’s subway system back to the hotel. It’s still rush hour and the subway cars are packed. We’ll have to buy new subway cards tomorrow, as the ones we have are only 24 hour cards. The subway isn’t hard to use as long as you can figure out your destination station. The app I’m using, Tokyo Subway , calculated the route once you have a beginning and end point, with whatever changes in lines are required, the direction (station) of each segment (so you’re going the right direction), the tariff and time. Also, it doesn’t require an Internet connection.