Dervish

The first full day was a whirlwind. I left the capsule hotel, and met up with my friend Toshiko, and then demanded she take me all over the city. Some highlights:

• Tsukiji. Early-morning sushi breakfast at the central fish market, in a tiny and packed sushi bar, eating fish caught just hours before. The best sushi I've ever had, by several orders of magnitude. Unspeakably delicious. I will never be able to eat sushi from a plastic box out of a cooler again.
• Hama Rikyu garden. Formerly a shogun's duck-hunting ponds and garden, it features a 300-year-old pine, a peony garden in full bloom, the last of the extra-puffy cherry blossoms, and a tea house (see below) on a little lake where we admired the view from tatami mats whilst consuming sweet little bean cakes and frothy bitter green tea, both delicious.
  
  
  
• Meiji Shrine. Old. Shinto. Mammoth scale. Ego-shrinking.
• Green tea frappucinos from a 3rd floor Starbucks in Shibuya, overlooking the famous scramble crossing where all pedestrians cross at once in all directions.