Jan. 1, 2012 - Happy New Year!

Today was a quiet day.  We worked on getting the blog started.  The video of the hotel room proved to be quite a challenge as it was so long, but our technical person figured out how to lower the resolution so that we could post it (that was after a lot of time spent dividing it into multiple files as an alternative). 

We asked at the hotel desk about a place close by we could go for lunch.  However, since it was New Year's Day, most places near the hotel were closed (or at least the places the hotel would send guests were closed).  Rather than spending the time to take the subway, we decided to just have lunch in one of the hotel's restaurants.  Talk about sticker shock!  Exxon pays for us to stay in a pretty nice hotel, but the food is on us, and a pretty nice hotel (especially in Tokyo) has expensive food.  My mom nearly had a heart attack when I told her the price of the lunch, so maybe here I should just mention the price of one of the items.  We already knew (from Drew's previous trips) that a soda in the restaurant was around 950 yen (about $13).  We avoided the soda and ordered ice teas instead.  Want to guess how much an iced tea was?  1350 yen!  We had never had $18 iced teas before!  Note: Drew saw that they poured it out of a box and didn't actually make the iced tea.  We think we'll stick with the water.  In the interest of a balanced story, we should say that it was a very good iced tea.

We did decide to go out for dinner.  The concierge found us an Italian restaurant in Roppongi Hills, an area of Tokyo where some of the Exxon families live.  Dinner was about the same price as lunch, but we got a lot more food.  And an ice tea was only 400 yen.  But don't expect free refills - Jen and Greer got seconds of their hot tea, and there were four hot teas on our bill.

Here's Greer and Cooper outside the restaurant:

Here's one of the very helpful subway signs.  Without them, we'd never get to where we want to go.

Japanese word of the day:  ni  (click to hear pronunciation) means "two"

We also wanted to include a Japanese phrase for today to say "Happy New Year."  However, it was beyond our abilities to figure out what phrase to use.  You can click on "Happy New Year" for a link to one of the pages we found with various expressions.