Day 2- Feb 11. Today is a National Holiday in Japan so it is not so crowded around town. Mai meets us at our hotel and we venture off to Takashimaya food court. We walked around sampling mochi, eggplant, crackers and vinegar juice! Yes, you read that right. Vinegar Juice. My sample was apricot honey vinegar juice. It was quite good. Not great, only because I think it will be a short-lived fad, but it was pretty interesting and surprisingly tasty.

Mai was going to visit her grandmother so we went off on our own, making use of our one day metro passes and headed off to Shibuya... to yet another department store, Tokyu. We picked up some onigiri, croquettes ( I don't care for croquettes) and a small salad. After walking around for a bit we got back on the subway and went to Asakusa where we spent the rest of the day. We walked down the main path leading to the temple and sampled lots of little snacky things. I had some sweet rice drink that was pretty good. Both mom and I shook the box and selected a stick that had a number that referred to a box that held the fate of our future.. seems you can get one of 3 fortunes and regular, bad and very good... Why no GREAT fortunes? I don't know. Actually, we later learned that this temple is known for having lots of "bad" fortunes, so we know feel much better that both of us received "regular" fortunes. In fact, we were told our regular fortunes are actually better than regular.

After walking around quite a bit, we decided to call it a day and went back home to our apt, "Weekly Mansion Hotel" in Akasaka. We planned to eat ramen noodles at a shop we had spotted with Mai the night before. She told us it was famous for Kyushu style ramen. Well, we ate there, and..... well, boo hissy on Kyushu ramen. We didn't like it. My ramen was too oily and there were two types of pork in it, one piece was thinly sliced but very fatty and they other was a chunk of meat, very dark red in color, but sweet. I don't like my food to be sweet. So sorry, Kyushu ramen did not make the All Things GREAT list. Oh well. I am sure there will be plenty more ramen ventures and we are bound to get lucky at least once. After all we have regular fortunes, which are supposed to actually be better than regular!