Quiet Day

The longest sleep ever

For a first night's sleep, we didn't do that badly.  Tom slept the best - he did a straight 15 and a half hours, don't think he moved either.  In fact Matt had to wake him up in the end.  He was bright for the rest of the day.  Matt and I managed 4 hours sleep, then 4 or 5 hours awake before another 4 hours sleep - so all in all not too bad.

We had an easy day.  First stop was our nearest supermarket where we stocked up with the bare essentials: milk, breakfast bits, coffee, etc etc.  We then headed over to the Hakata Station area for a look around and to familiarise ourselves with all the local facilities.  We found our local Daiso (100 yen shop) which happily is absolutely massive - it is definitely going to be my place of choice for holiday shopping before we come home, saw loads of new things which looked interesting....

Okonomiyaki in the making

We then hunted out restaurant alley for lunch and found ourselves a fab okonomiyaki restaurant where we had a 'deluxe' and an 'ebi' and very nice it was too!  We then got ourselves some platform tickets for the shinkansen tracks in the station and headed down to see what we could find, we saw quite a number of N700s, a couple of Rail Stars and Sakuras, but sadly no 500 series (the blue train).  We then had another stomp around Yodobashi Camera before heading home for a quiet time and recuperation.

We asked Tom what he wanted for tea - there was no contest - it had to be Shinkansen sushi, a 'sushi go round' where your orders are delivered by train - for us it was Dr Yellow!  How cool is that?  The sushi wasn't particularly amazing (some came with warm rice) and some menu items were a little strange (cheeseburger sushi?!) but it was all readily eaten and with each plate being about 80p (rather than the £4- £8 you get charged at Yo Sushi) there really was no call for complaining.  The whole meal came to 4,000 Yen, and 2,000 Yen of that was beer!  The equivalent would have cost a small fortune at home.

Tom and a Tokyo-bound Nozomi

We came home happy.  Tom went straight to bed, and once again we struggled to stay awake until 9pm, but managed it (just) and happily rolled into bed.