Morning...and other things

One of the side effects of jet lag is that I have become (temporarily) a morning person. Wake up at 7:30 with no coffee or burrowing into the covers? No problem! I had to mentally put myself back to bed at around 2:00 am. This "morning thing" will pass, but for now it's kind of fun to see how most of the people in the world operate.

I'm sitting in bed at our 2nd hotel: the Cocochee hotel (http://cocochee.jp/) in Numazu. We got an amazing rate from the website www.agoda.com and this hotel is a huge step up from my usual level of travel lodgings. It's been recently redone and while our room is small, it has that well thought-out design and nice small touches that usually signify a hotel rate that I can't afford. (Photos to follow.)
After this, I'll go get ready for the day and we'll head down to the breakfast buffet. Then we're off to the port for some site-seeing and ferry-riding.

Last night we went to an izakaya (kind of like a Japanese tapas/pub), one of my favorite kinds of restaurants to eat at. You order a bunch of different dishes and share them. We had some cheese potato croquette, grilled pork with green onion, crunchy cucumber salad, dumplings, and "takowasa." Takowasabi is one of those dishes that kind of looks like snot and I often wonder why I like it. Basically, it's little chopped up bits of raw octopus mixed with wasabi. It's spicy, crisp, and because of the small pieces and freshness, the often rubbery octopus stays easy to chew. Richard wasn't quite up to it last night (like I said, it does have an unfortunate likeness to snot), but there's always hope.