Budget cherry blossoms

Willow and I started the day off correctly with getting a banana muffin and doppio espresso respectively for first breakfast. Then on the way back to the hotel we picked up a bento box of fried chicken, rice and tamagoyaki to share back at the hotel for second breakfast and a tamagoyaki sando for Heidi.

Breakfast of champions

We couldn't book the Shinkansen tickets online with our credit cards and also there was a concern we wouldn't be able to sit together so we went to Tokyo station to book in person. Luckily we were able to sort it out there and get the tickets to sit together as there is a festive season in Japan when we are coming back from Osaka called Golden week where there's a lot of people travelling.

With the tickets secured, I saw a sign saying the Imperial palace was nearby so we went to check that out. Apparently you need to book a tour to get right into the grounds, but the walk around the outside was pretty cool and we got to see a few of the old guard castles from the outside. 

Our main goal of the day was to see the cherry blossoms at Meguro River. Apparently this spot is one of the best if you're trying to keep your Instagram game strong. Unfortunately we were a bit late in the season and got the temu version. There were still some clinging on which was a nice consolation prize.

Somewhat deflated, we needed some food to fill the void in our sad sakura hearts. So we hiked back up the hill to Meguro town and settled on some Mos Burger for lunch. Word to the wise, there seems to be a lot less English on menus and even the train station signage so come prepared in the Meguro district. Anyway luckily the menu had pictures and we managed to order 2 burgers and a 6 pieces of fried chicken, which didn't go to waste as we took 2 pieces of fried chicken home and Willow cained them in the comfort of our hotel room later.

After some rest and leftover fried chicken we went to Shinjuku to see the 3D cat billboard and Godzilla building. For dinner we went to a place called Gyopao Gyoza, it was quite popular apparently so we were lucky to get in and had a 45 minute time limit to cain all our dumplings. The gyopao was a soupy Taiwanese style dumpling which was like a massive massive xiao long bao soup dumpling that came out in a bubbling broth. Pretty tasty. Afterwards we went to the familiar old pretend English pub/bar chain called "The Hub" to kill some time until we had to go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building. 

It's the largest permanent light show projection/display in the world. It runs every night and the show changes. The show we saw ran for about 15 minutes and it was really nice. There's music played over speakers but not really loud, if you bring headphones apparently you can sync them up on the website. We went home after and found one of the streets in our area parallel to the one we normally walk down to the train station looked super cool so will hit it up at some point hopefully!