It was right around 7:30pm, when I walked into the hotel room. Elizabeth was in bed with the lights out and Escher was laid out on the bed next to her. I regaled to her my incredible story to retrieve the vouchers. She was only about half awake, so she didn’t hop up and give me a hug and a kiss and say, “My hero!” She just sort of yawned. I told her that we still had until 8 that night to redeem the rail passes, and that it was only one station away. She told me that she had gone on enough adventures for one day.
Escher was still sleeping, so we waited a little before putting him in the stroller and getting him ready to head back out into the world. Elizabeth was still mentioning buying more shoes, but her hunger had won out in the end. I told her about the all night restaurant that I had gone to the night before. She wasn’t interested, because they didn’t have vegetarian food. Along the same block however, there looked to be two or three restaurants that were still open. Finally, the rain was letting up as we went to the first restaurant on the corner called Kotoba-cho. It looked to be busy inside and there didn’t appear to be room for the stroller, but we asked them for a menu anyway. They handed us a menu that had photos of everything on their menu, but we couldn’t decipher whether the items were vegetarian or not. We asked them for an English menu, but when they didn’t have one available, we decided to move on to the place right next door.
This restaurant, whose name I couldn’t translate from kanji, had large red lamps at the entrance and looked to be decorated in a traditional style. There was a menu on the outside, which Elizabeth looked over and from what she could tell, they served something that was vegetarian. The restaurant wasn’t very big just one row of tables that went back 20 feet or so. One side of the table was bench seating and the other side chairs. The lighting was low and the restaurant was decorated with Japanese art. We were the only ones in the restaurant when we walked in and we were greeted by a man who was in his late 20’s or early 30’s. We asked him if he could speak English and he couldn’t, but we were able to ask him for an English menu. I had made up some cards with Japanese phrases on them that I hoped would help me in situations like this. I wrote one up for Elizabeth that said, “Do you have a vegetarian menu, please?” in Japanese and for her to use communicate with a host or waiter.
The gentleman seated us near the back of the restaurant, where there was a space between two tables where we were able to hide Escher’s stroller. The waiter provided us with the English menu and I used my card that said, “what do you recommend?”. He pointed to the house special that looked like a mountain of meat, that was about 8 inches tall on a plate. They would bring out a hot plate and I would have had to cook the meat myself. There was beef, shrimp, and a bunch of other unrecognizable ingredients, but it was mostly meat. Elizabeth looked at me, then shook her head and held up her vegetarian phrase card. The waiter nodded and smiled, then flipped to a page in the menu that was only vegetarian dishes.
I wasn’t really sure what I wanted, so I started off with some miso soup, then I flipped through the menu again to find a dish of teriyaki tri-tip steak on lettuce. Elizabeth found something that she wanted as well, then finished off by ordering up some hot sake. The waiter nodded and went back into the kitchen to pass on our order.
Shortly after we ordered, a gentleman in his 50’s walked in with two younger men. They started ordering up drinks that I found out were a rice and potato vodka drink. They were really going through them. When they would order something the older man would finish up by saying “Kata Kudasai!” which I took to mean “One more please!” I said it later on our trip and came to find out it really meant, “Buy me another one on the house!” so there was definitely something lost in the translation. The three gentleman ordered the large mountain of meat, which I had imagined was the house specialty. On a Friday night, a mountain of meat and rice vodka is just what people need to let loose.
I couldn’t really understand anything that the three of them were saying, but I kept looking over, because they were acting so obnoxious and fun to watch. At some point our food came, but between the sake that we were drinking and our entertaining neighbors, I wasn’t fully focused on the meal. The tri-tip was sweet and delicious, but I regretted not having it on rice or with vegetables. The gentlemen at the other table started noticing that I was looking over and they started talking to me in Japanese. I would raise my glass and say “Kanpai!” and they would toast me back. I asked them how they knew each other, and one of the young men explained that he was there with his brother and father.
The youngest, who wore glasses and had spiking hair began talking into a translator app, then started asking me questions. He asked where we were from, and whether Elizabeth and I were married. He would come over to our table and show me what was on his phone, then I would respond into the app, which would translate what I said back to him. He was getting a real thrill out of the conversation. At some point, he said something to the effect of “Your love is beautiful. I am so happy for you.” A few minutes later they bought us a couple of mugs of rice vodka on ice. As we took a sip of the drink, we felt like it was just vodka on ice, but there might have been a little bit of water to dilute it.
We thanked them for the drinks, then toasted to them. We asked the young man if he was married, but he said, “No.” I asked if they were celebrating something. He said that they were celebrating his brother, but he didn’t say why. They finished their drinks, then paid their bill. Shortly after, they were replaced by a young couple. We finished up our drinks, paid our bill, then decided to head back to the hotel. We were pretty tipsy as we walked out, so luckily we only had a block to walk as we headed back to our hotel. We had brought our umbrellas, but for the first time that day, it wasn’t raining. Escher had been asleep since part of the way through our meal, and he was comfortable in his stroller as we headed back.
When we got back to the hotel, I planned out our trip to the train station for the next morning, to where I thought we would be leaving from, or at least the station where we could exchange our vouchers for our rail passes. It would only be a 20 minute walk from the hotel to the Tokyo Station. In spite of my jet lag, I was exhausted from all of the adventures that we had gone on that day. I set the alarm on my phone, so that we could wake up early, head to the station to get our passes, then head up to Nagano.