When yesterday started I was still exhausted. After being up for 28 hours, I could hardly think and 8 hours of sleep only got me part of the ay back to normal. With another nights sleep, I feel like I have fully recovered.
After visiting with JETRO yesterday, I went and got a beef bowl for lunch with Paul and Keiko. What a great concept for lunch; thin slices of beef and onion on perfectly cooked rice for about 3 dollars. We went from lunch to a guided tour of the imperial palace.
The grounds of the palace are amazing and we were within 50 feet of the actual residence of the royal family. The tour was all in Japanese so we listened to pre-recorded information on the grounds, but we learned a lot. We got a chance to see some of the biggest bonsai trees I have ever seen (okay, so they weren't actually bonsai, but they had been pruned in a similar manner to give them a very similar look).
We walked through Habia park and the Imperial Palace Hotel (a very, very high end hotel where I found a bottle of whiskey that they were asking 55,000 yen for (at an exchange rate of 78, that is $705). the hotel itself is absolutely beautiful, but I cannot imagine the price of staying there.
Following that, we went to the Ginza which is a high end shopping district. Paul and I set off for coffee (Starbucks of course) and the apple store for some free wifi before heading out to a bookstore with the best selection of fountain pens I have ever seen. The book store was cool (though books and magazine from America in English were really expensive), but the pen shop was awesome. We hung out and went to a variety of different stores before heading for Shaba Shaba for dinner.
All you can eat thin slices of meat cooked in broth accompanied by all you can drink. I'm sure you can guess why I didn't post anything last night.
This morning we were back at Starbucks for breakfast before heading to a great meeting at Interlink. Interlink is a British company that helps European and US firms to enter Japan and other North Asian countries. The meeting was very insightful and provided a real counterpoint to the message from JETRO about how to do business in Japan.
Thats all for now. More tomorrow.
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