It's always good to sleep in, and as previously noted Japanese hotels tend to have quite effective blackout curtains.
We’d had a late night, so there was a late rise and we set out for a light breakfast at a nearby patisserie, though we could have done reasonably well at the hotel coffee shop.
Gokan patisserie was just around the corner and down the road in a former business house in the merchant district. I’ve been in similar buildings elsewhere, with a large central space and an assortment of what you can probably safely assume were offices around the central space on two levels.
The central space housed the bakery retail operation and people after nibbles and coffee are ushered upstairs into one or other of the former office spaces, where the service is predictably attentive and the nibbles excellent.
The coffee wasn’t bad either.
So that was breakfast done, and once we’d reclaimed the baggage there were three items on the agenda for the rest of the day.
The first was the inevitable relocation to the next hotel, which was just around the corner (okay, two) from Zepp Namba, which was the venue for item #3 on the agenda, the fourth Costello concert.
In between we had to meet up with The Sister and The Rowdy Niece for lunch, which didn’t seem like a major source of difficulty, but we got ourselves into one of those circumstances where you don’t quite manage to get the intersection of the physical geography and the underground infrastructure right.
We made our way to the right underground station in what should have been plenty of time to find the hotel, check in and then rock over to meet up with our visitors from July/August, who’d done more than their fair share of making sure this little odyssey had (a) happened and (b) turned out well on the concert front.
Tickets for four concerts via The Sister, were what had brought Hughesy there, and I wanted to reassure her that the local convenience store lottery (you’ll find a Family Mart on every second street corner, or at least that was the way it seemed) had delivered good seats.
Having arrived at the right station your next task i to select the correct exit and have a fair idea where you’re going. We weren’t very strong on the second, and totally messed up the first, so need to find your way to the correct exit and have a sense of where you're going from there. We didn't have it quite nailed, and, consequently, we were late for the arranged lunch with the Sister and The Rowdy Niece.