As we headed down for the Ridiculously Healthy Breakfast, I found myself musing on a seemingly incongruous matter. I’d woken up a couple of times during the night and heard noises somewhere in the vicinity, yet, once the sun had risen I’d slept soundly despite the presence of a major arterial road carrying substantial traffic outside the window.
I’d crashed with intentions of knocking over the review of last night’s concert before breakfast, but the late night and what seemed like impervious soundproofing had allowed me to sleep in until well after seven o’clock.
Yet, in the still of the night I’d heard things going on.
Strange.
I knocked breakfast over fairly quickly, working on the principle that it wouldn’t do any harm to cut back on the dietary input, and headed back upstairs to knock over the rest of the concert review. That took a bit longer than it might have done since Madam was intent on doing something during the daylight hours.
As a result, it became a question of Where do you want to go?
Actually I'd have preferred to go nowhere, maybe taking a walk through the back streets of Roppongi in daylight, looking for second hand collector CD stores and generally taking it easy.
That, it seemed, wasn’t an option.
So, while I finished the review, Madam, being helpful, set out on a Google search for CD stores, which ended up sending us on a loop through Tokyo Midtown that failed to produce any results whatsoever. Once I’d finished the concert review, of course.
Japanese neighbourhoods and back streets being what they are there’s no guarantee I’d have found what I was looking for anyway. You’d need local knowledge if you’re going to conduct a successful search sortie in that sort of environment. Since no one had wandered up to ask if I was the bloke from Costello-L who’d been posting on Facebook local knowledge was almost nonexistent.
In that case, having drawn a blank on the music shops it was a case of heading off to the Imperial Palace.
Not that I'm a fan of royal families and their residences, you understand, but there were reports of rather impressive landscaped gardens, which are always worth a look.
That took us underground, to negotiate the intricacies of the Tokyo Metro. We ended up at a station that, according to Madam, who had Japanese commoner background knowledge, should have been close to the iconic double bridge that forms the main entrance to the Palace, located on the site of Edo Castle, the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns who ruled Japan from 1603 until 1867.