Friday January 27th 2023 - Last workday in Japan - Japan trip for work, day 6, A few miles walked

Thursday night's work went well and didn't involve staying up too late.  Plus I had a real dinner from the Hotel food court.  It was my first attempt at ordering from the ubiquitous Japanese ticket machine restaurant.  Basically you buy a tiny paper ticket from an automated machine representing whatever item(s) you are ordering. You either give the staff member part of the ticket or sometimes I think it shows up on a monitor automatically.  When the food is ready they call your number, maybe page you if they have pagers, and you go get your food.  I had spaghetting Bolognese style and a Caesar salad plus some red wine.  Very satisfying.

Friday started with an early meeting with a California colleague to discuss the new backup system.  I did a number of IT clean up tasks and administrative work for the new equipment.  Yukie and I ate at a lovely French Bistro type place in the atrium of the office complex.  It was another chance to have a salad, something I'm really appreciating because the meaty rice and noodle dishes I've been eating so much of aren't really packed with vegetables.  This lunch was also an opportunity to try the 'Mont Blanc' type cake that is very visually striking and common here. It's a cake with several layers but the most interesting bit is on top.  What looks like whole wheat spaghetti is an extruded sweetened chestnut paste.  As in chestnuts roasting on an open fire.  The chestnut paste is not my thing.  It has, to me, an Earthy taste that was more 'interesting' than 'great'.  Still, it was nice to try.  We took a bare 10 minutes to explore the Japanese Garden public space which is clearly owned by Gate City Ohsaki but both ends of the path come out to a public street, an interesting and welcoming touch compared to a typical US approach to those things which would almost certainly NOT connect directly to a public street but rather from within a space that the public wouldn't feel welcome going into unless they were a customer of the development in some way.

We slipped out of the office around 3, hit the hotel very briefly to drop stuff off and then visited a shrine, a pagoda and the traditional narrow pedestrian shopping streets around it.  I purchased two wood block prints with cartoon cats on them and had them mailed home.  We had a delightful warm bean filled cookie sold from one of the small vendors along the street, it was a lovely warm bite.  I also had a famous Japanese vitamin C packed drink that came in a tiny glass and was very refreshing and tart.  Later we walked across a river which is lined with numerous bridges, each with a different style of lighting at night.  That took us to the Skytree area, a famous viewing tower and very built-up area around it.  

Lastly, my primary Japan contact plus Yukie and I went out for a very relaxed but more formal traditional multi-course Japanese dinner near our hotel.  I pre confessed my terrible chopstick skills but opted not to ask for a fork.  There were so many dishes it would be hard to recall them all but it included some beautiful cuts of tuna, a few other sashimi slices, a fish cake soup, a pasta dish, a rich creamy chicken and crab (?) casserole that seemed very French influenced, several pickled vegetable items and some lovely smoky ham slices.  Then a very elegant and petite dessert plate with the most amazing tasting orange segment lovingly trimmed of all the white bits, a tiny dot of whipped cream, and much to the amusement of me and Yukie, a little cube of Mont Blanc cake.  To be sure, the chestnut paste at this restaurant seemed milder but the real value in it was that it was there the same day I'd had such a ho-hum reaction to it earlier.  Oddly (to me), quite a long time after we'd completed our dessesrt, cups of hot tea came out before the staff kind of asked us to wrap up. :)  Our dinner probably spanned 2 hours.