Day 12 (17 September)

Who knows what's special about this day? Anyone? Well fine, I'll just tell you then. Matt and I have officially been dating for four years. Yay!

After a lazy morning that consisted of recovering from Kyoto, there was more cow hunting. My amazing cow collection is now missing only two cows. One we quasi-found, but it was hiding in a locked alley. The other we just couldn't find. Both will be turned into filet mignon, as promised. MEEEAAAT anybody?

Running around the humid city left us in a state of disarray, so the two missing cows received a temporary reprieve to allow us enough time to get ready for dinner.

I wore my amazing new skirt. Matt spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to correctly tie his new tie, and was ultimately forced to settle for a merely acceptable end distribution. That makes sense, if you've seen the tie and him in a duel with it.

Dinner itself was at Signature, Mandarin Oriental's French restaurant that was listed as one star in the Tokyo Michelin Guide. On my side of the table, the first course was a soup type pesto thing. On Matt's side, it was Thumper. I mean rabbit. Next came soup, which I found to be a bit oily for my taste. However, I forgot all about the soup when the Japanese Hakata beef arrived. It was easily the best beef I have ever eaten. Unfortunately, it was also the smallest portion I have ever received in a restaurant.

Throughout the meal, small palate cleansers were served. One of them happened to have eel in it. After some prodding from Matt, mostly centered around this eel tasting better than the previous night's, I tried it. That's right, I tried eel two nights in a row! And then I gave the rest to Matt.

Dessert was much better than the eel, but nothing nearly as amazing at the beef. Dessert was supposed to include a trip to the Mandarin Bar for drinks, but that was cancelled due to my having imbibed half a bottle of Burgundy. And so ended the day, with two happy and full people collapsing in their hotel room.