A day in Tokyo

Yesterday Tetsu and I did a "first" and went to Tokyo on a VIP outing!

Uh-hum.  Not that we are VIP... but Tetsu's boss had VIP tickets to the musical, Les Miserables, and he wasn't going to be able to use them so he passed them along to Tetsu and said,

"Take your wife!"

We've been looking forward to this for months.  (I've been looking forward to it...  Tetsu thinks it a lot of rig-a-ma-role.)

Musical tickets included Bullet Train tickets to Tokyo so off we went early in the morning, parked our car at the station and rode the Bullet Train into the metropolitan.  A pretty full train so we didn't sit together...

We arrived at the renovated Tokyo Station and walked to the Imperial Theater.

We were then escorted (along with a couple hundred other "VIP") to a very fancy Japanese style restaurant where we enjoyed a wonderful boxed lunch.  Take a look at that...  Let's see... center back was grilled fish, chicken, pickled squid, a shellfish in shell and a pretty carved lotus root.  To the right of that were some simmered vegetables... how do you like that carved pumpkin morsel there.  Coming front right were raw fish and pickles.  Left front was potato salad, a grilled scallop, simmered konyaku potato and a few pieces of tempura.  And left back was fruit and a slice of cheesecake.  Of course rice and miso soup were also served.  The other interesting thing about this lunch box was that all the containers there are plastic.  They look like Japanese pottery pieces of different sizes and they have painted decorations on them but they are all disposable. 

The musical was wonderful but of course no photos allowed.  It was the first time for Tetsu and me to see a musical!  All in Japanese but absolutely wonderful.  I should have read Victor Hugo's book first though... I didn't really know the story.

As a parting gift, we each received a wooden box of cookies with an enclosed letter about how extremely embarrassed the travel company was at their poor efforts of being hospitable.  Hah!  I have never been so royally treated!

Tetsu and I had a bit of time before we headed back home so we checked out the buildings near the Tokyo Station.

We stopped in at a new shopping site that was interesting though absolutely everything is so extremely costly.  Not my type of shopping at all.

"How can people in Tokyo afford to buy anything?  Just pretty trinkets at an exorbitant price!"

Tetsu pointed out that probably most of the people at the shopping site were tourists like us come too oogle and not Tokyo residents at all.  It was fun to browse though.

We arrived home in the evening to enjoy our cookies.  I think I'll use one of the boxes as a new sewing box.