Thursday, 12 December 2013
Strange.
We're in a hotel room fronting a busy three-level roadway, and I'm woken a couple of times through the early morning by traffic noise and other sounds from outside.
You wake, thinking it's around six or seven, comfortably before peak hour because there's no noise outside. Then you check the time, and it's already twenty past eight.
Put a tick in the box alongside Unexpected Sleep-In…
After a shower, and a check of Costello-L Facebook comments where I discovered errors in the setlist I posted the night before,
I corrected my copy, then headed down to a healthy breakfast with no sign of eggs, bacon or other mainstays of the standard Western breakfast.
I wasn't overly upset since it was relatively late. We were looking at a substantial lunch. I'd pencilled in a visit to the oyster bar before the night's concert.
Back upstairs, recent comments on Facebook suggested that Costello-L's Japanese correspondent Ayako made it into the show, and may have gotten to spin the wheel.
But there were more important fish to fry aside from wondering whether Wheel-Spinning Ayako and Costello-L Ayako are one and the same.
As it turned out, they were.
But after four days on the road, there were laundry issues that needed to be addressed.
That meant it was time to pack up the washing and head off to the coin laundry.
A check at the front desk produced a set of directions that seemed rather complicated. They suggested an up hill and down dale and into side streets affair. On the other hand, Madam's research located a place in the basement of a building on the opposite side of the main road the hotel faces.
Far simpler. Score one for Thorough Research.
You could also score one for inability to check pockets were empty as an issue with tissues caused a delay in the drier proceedings.
With the washing done and semi-dry, we headed back to Hotel S.
The room hadn't been made up, so there was no chance to drape the almost dry over every available surface.
Never mind, we weren't going that far.
When we headed back out, we reckoned there'd be plenty to see on a short walk around Roppongi. We had one significant commercial development across the road (Roppongi Hills) and other a couple of hundred metres down the street past the Ex (Tokyo Midtown).
We headed for the latter, intending to visit t'other on the way back.
You'll possibly conclude we're talking shopping centres here, and in a way we are.
But they're more than just a couple of retail developments in the sense that Australian consumers have become accustomed to.
There's a significant difference in size and scale.
Tokyo Midtown is a $3 billion (¥370 billion) mixed-use development with more than half a million square metres of floor space on a 7.8 hectare (19.4 acres) site formerly occupied by the Japan Defense Agency.
Completed in March 2007, it's a mixture of office, residential, commercial, hotel, and leisure space.
The complex includes the tallest office building in Tokyo (the 248-metre Midtown Tower) and the new location of the Suntory Museum of Art.
So it's not just a shopping centre. However, there's plenty of high-end shopping action available in the five-floor Galleria complex. A variety of restaurants and the like includes a wine bar (Coppola's Vinoteca) dedicated to the wines of Francis Ford Coppola.
Office space tenants include Fujifilm, Fuji Xerox, Yahoo! Japan and international law firms, as well as a medical clinic affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The 250-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel occupies the 47th through 53rd floors of Midtown Tower, complete with a $20,000 per night Presidential Suite and an authentic 200-year-old Japanese teahouse.
If you're after a little peace and quiet after the credit card has been given a thorough working over, the complex includes Hinokichō. It was formerly a private garden attached to an Edo Period villa, reopened as a public park. There's also the cherry tree-lined Midtown Garden.
Less than a kilometre away, the older, but similarly scaled Roppongi Hills offers more of the same.
We weren't there for shopping. Madam was scoping the place out before an evening rendezvous with an old friend, and Hughesy was up for something along the lines of lunch.
After a week on the road, I didn't need something substantial.
The lunch venue was a matter of debate, hardly surprising with the range of options.
We ended up at an Italian eatery where mozzarella was the main focus.
Lunch, as it turned out, was a fairly basic pizza and a panini. Along with glasses of red and white that did the job quite nicely. From there, we wandered back towards Roppongi Hills.
Like where we'd just left, you can throw around impressive statistics about Roppongi Hills.
It's older (opened in 2003), slightly larger (109,000m²), and a tad more expensive, constructed at the cost of $4 billion on more than four hundred separate lots amalgamated by developer Minoru Mori.
The plan was to build an integrated development, an all-in-one live, work and play environment.
We weren't there for the shopping, heading more or less straight for the upper levels of the 54-storey Mori Tower, where we had an appointment with the Tokyo City View.
I don't have a great head for heights. So I wasn't keen on shelling the extra ¥500 that'd get us onto the open-air Sky Deck on the top-level. We'd already paid ¥1500 for the basic package.
That included admission to the Moro Art Museum, something I wasn't keen on given the fact that the featured exhibition was devoted to The Art of Peanuts.
Once we'd taken in the views, I'd sneaked in a Trappist ale before we went into the gallery to check out an exhibition that focused on new ideas from around the world.
It allegedly keeps the art accessible to the public, rather than making it overly obscure or esoteric.
That may be much the same territory as MONA in Hobart, where we'd been in the recent past, but I have to say this display didn't do a whole lot for me.
Back downstairs, we headed back to the hotel, where after ten minutes the room looked as if it had been the target of a significant panty raid.
It would have made a decent display piece in the Art Museum if we'd been able to come up with a postmodern metaphor for airing not quite dry laundry.
Madam had a six o'clock appointment with a friend from University days but left at five.
I walked her as far as the Oyster Bar, stopped for four of Japan's best prime oysters and a Yebisu.
I popped into the nearby gourmet store on the way back to pick up a half bottle of nondescript 2011 Bordeaux (¥925, and you get what you paid for).
I had half an hour upstairs at the hotel, then headed down to the restaurant for dinner (pasta con vongole bianco with a glass of prosecco) and rocked off for Night Two. The show was, again, highly enjoyable.
The concert itself is reviewed here.
When I got back to the hotel just after ten-thirty Madam had reports of spectacular Christmas lights that I'd missed, what with the concert and all.
I took my time typing up the night's setlist, sipping on a French red wine that was OK without hitting any altitude whatsoever.
As I said, you get what you pay for.
If you haven't paid much, you tend not to have high expectations.
And so to bed…