SOME WEIRD AND CRAZY THINGS ABOUT TOKYO

Day started with two courses of an excellent breakfast buffet.

This painting was just in front of me.

The Korea Festival was playing below us, so we went.

That building on the left is the Tokyo Westin.

Various Korean foods.

Flight Centre of New Zealand published 10 weird things about Tokyo, and Erika's Travelventures had 40 more.

Visit the magical Ghibli Museum. The Hayao Miyazaki Studio features, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and other animated attractions. Take the Orange Chuo Line to Mitaka.

Go to Karaoke Kan Shibuya to sing More Than This, as Bill Murray did in Lost in Translation.
Have a meal at Enter the Void, a robot restaurant in Kabukicho. Flashing lights, scantily clad women and robot servers. Hotels can get you a two-for-one deal. Four shows/day. Bad food, good entertainment. Can bring children. Oh, this was rebranded Samurai Restaurant, with same stuff.

Visit Akihabara, an electric city where you can buy all sorts of electronics.
Watch crazy kids in the wildest outfits in Harajuku.
Also eat rainbow food in Harajuku: ice cream, grilled cheese, cotton candy, etc.
Sleep in a capsule hotel. Prices from $35/night up, but usually around $100. Went to one for the experience. Watch a video.

Why would you want to go there, but there is a poop museum, called the Crappy Unko Museum. Enough said.
Shop for fake food. You can show your friends what you ate. One place is Ganso Sample-ya.

Not for me, but there is Hello Kitty Land. Or Keio Plaza Hotel has a Hello Kitty room where you can stay.
Meet Godzilla. He's peeping over the top of the Toho movie complex in Shinjuku. Roars and steams at the top of the hour. Sneak into the Hotel Gracery and see if you go up to head level, which does have a Godzilla room. Also a Godzilla store in Shinjuku.

Visit a Maid Cafe, which caters to obsessed mostly young men into computer games, manga and cosplay. Akihabara is a good start.
Setagaya has Gotokuji Cat Temple, with no live cats, but a lot of maneki-neko.

Ever have pufferfish, the meal that can kill. Not much anymore. We went to such a restaurant last year. Read Food & Wine's How to Safely Eat Pufferfish. We went to one of these in our previous trip to Japan.

You can have a rice bun hamburger at Mos Burger.
There is the Nakizumo Crying Baby Festival in late April at Sensoji Temple. Free.
I can go on and on.

An extraordinary thing happened over the past 24 hours at the Tokyo Westin.

Last night, to cap the evening, we dropped by Friday night in what was once Compass Rose.
With all the upgrading, that bar is gone. In it's place is Sky Bar Escalier.
I had a 20-Year Old Nikka Yoichi at Compass Rose, but neglected to drop by for at least five years, mostly because of the pandemic.
Well, they couldn't find it, but understandable for they said that I needed to return at least every six months for them to keep the bottle.
After half a dozen staff tried to find my Yoichi for almost an hour, they failed.
So I asked them to look into this further, as I had one more night in this hotel.
At 5PM this Saturday night I got a call from the Escalier. A Mr. Liu. They reported that they found my bottle.
So I went up, and surely enough, there it was. Keep in mind that Nikka Yoichi was the Japanese whiskey that first broke the Scottish stranglehold on the best scotch of the year competition. Until Yoichi was entered and won in 2001.
Then in 2007 Nikka Taketsuru 21 Years Old prevailed, with Suntory Hibiki 30 Years Old, too.
In 2008 Nikka Single Malt Yoichi 1987 won.
Japanese whiskies consistently was selected as best in subsequent years.

So this bottle was brought to the Executive Club at 5:30PM where we had a jigger or so each over ice. This Mr. Liu brought the bottle back to Escalier, and we indicated that we would be there at 7PM to get another shot or two. Some photos, first from the Executive Club.

After some appetizers, champagne, Chivas and that Yoichi, we moved on to Escalier.

Our view.

We ordered a hamburger and a wagyu sandwich, with french fries. Fabulous.

Asked for the check, and no charge. What a way to end the night.

13,753 steps for the past two days.

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome. This strain has also been spreading in

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for several months. This is caused by stress more than anythi

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been

Search This Blog