Third day here and everybody seems to have snapped out of their jet lag funk. The boys and I were at the breakfast buffet at 6:30 am and then checked out the New Pier, which is right outside the hotel and a lot like Battery Park City, with fancy restaurants behind glass walls, landscaped promenades and passenger ferry docks. It's in the 50s and sunny and the boys are running and laughing and climbing on rocks...
We decide we have enough energy to go to IKEA, but before we head to the train station the boys and I make a quick stop at the am/pm (think 7Eleven) to load up on snacks: fruit-flavored hard candies, juice boxes (mango!), Starbucks iced latte, McVitties digestives (those yummy biscuits with milk chocolate!), a bag o' grape "G Fresh" (gumdrops in the shape of a soda bottle that taste like sourpatch kids) and some potato rings (worse than pringles, but you can wear them on your finger). It's an embarrassing bounty of crap but the boys were freaking out a little and I needed to distract them (ok, bribe them). Good to know there's no shortage of junk food here.
IKEA is basically a success: we get the boys bunk beds (the same metal frame one they had in New York) and desks (small white tables with adjustable-height legs), and we also pick out a dining room table and chairs. We had to change trains twice and take a shuttle bus and then we took the wrong bullet train home, but the boys did get to play in a ball pit and we all made it back to the hotel without injury, and with some new pillows and comforters and a few other odds and ends. Let's face it, IKEA always seems like a good idea...until you find yourself trying to load boxes of assembly-required furniture onto a runaway flatbed cart without flattening your children (or yourself). In that way, and really in every other way, from the Swedish meatballs to the big blue plastic shopping bags, IKEA Japan is just like IKEA New Jersey, strangely comforting in its consistency. I hope not to return any time soon.
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