Japan - Day 5
Today is Sports Day - Sumo and Baseball. But first we visited the Imperial Place near downtown Tokyo. The palace grounds are right in the middle of the city where the business district is. The main buildings are not accessible and surrounded by moats. We took a quick picture, then skedaddled.
Our next destination was the Tokyo Conrad Hotel. Bix wanted to visit it based on the reference in an A Tribe Called Quest song. We had a very pricey lunch and a couple of drinks at this five-star hotel with views of the bay.
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| Terunofuji is introduced |
From there we decided to head to the opening day of the Sumo tournament. I couldn't get tickets myself directly from the Sumo site, but I got a guided tour through Klook with seats for the afternoon - which are when the best matches are for the day. Plus our tour guide explained what was going on and how the scoreboard worked, so it worked out for the best. It was really great to experience the matches live and we could see well even though our seats were in the second to last row in the stadium. Bix was 8 for 9 in picking the winners of the elite matches.
We left just before the final matches which, unfortunately, were with the top-ranked Sumos, including Terunofuju, the only Yokozuna (top) level wrestler, but we had to get to the baseball stadium by 6pm.
The baseball stadium for the Yakult Swallows was not far from Shinjuku, in the Meiji Jingu stadium. We had seats along the first base line which we got in advance through Japanball.com who made the process of buying and receiving the tickets incredibly easy. Bix ate hot dogs and we had a lot of Asahi Super Dry throughout the game. Asian baseball games always seem to be more fun than the games in America. The fans and opposing fans sing songs and cheer throughout the game.
During the 7th inning stretch, the Swallows fans hoisted small umbrellas. I got some beer-courage to speak Japanese to the young man sitting next to me who was very kind. We talked over the last couple innings and the Swallows won a tight game 3-1 by scoring runs in the 6th, 7th, and 8th innings!
Umbrella Party
After baseball, Bix and I met up with his friend from UT who was traveling with a tour group of guys from England, South Africa, and Australia. We hit up Golden Gai one more time, ending up at a tiny bar called RED. where we took up the whole top floor - all 100 square feet of it. We got home pretty late, but were good to go for our travels the following day.
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