With the morning to kill before heading to the airport, we wandered over to the Imperial Palace to explore the allegedly beautiful gardens they have there. Looking for breakfast on route through the skyscrapers of the financial district we somehow stumbled across a branch of Dean & Deluca and so we stopped to buy muffins, coffee and sandwiches to eat later for lunch. I was so pleased to find somewhere so nice to eat, I immediately declared Dean & Deluca the third best thing I'd seen all holiday; however, in retrospect this possibly was not fair to the Fushimi Shrine in Kyoto.
The Imperial Gardens were pretty much a flop, thanks to an over-use of tarmac and concrete, but we enjoyed our sandwiches and did enjoy a fairly small stroll garden in one corner, where the pathways were a couple of feet wide rather than ten metres and there was plenty of verdant shrubbery. Still, I was by this point stricken with Japan fatigue and when Paul asked what I wanted to do next, I simply shrugged and suggested we get the hell to the airport.
When discussing our travel plans, we both made the simplistic error of guessing that since Japan and New Zealand are both quite far away from the UK, they're probably pretty close to each other. Even two days ago we believed it would only be a three hour flight to Christchurch, so we had a little bit of a surprise when we checked our travel documents and realised we had a fourteen hour trip ahead of us – including a one hour change in Sydney. We flew with Qantas, an airline which appears to assume its passengers are all amputees as no room is provided to store ones legs. We consequently didn't get any sleep at all, although we did see the latest Jennifer Aniston flop, Love Happens, and Matt Damon's film The Informant!, which is not as funny as the editor of its trailer seems to think it is.
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