Lunch with Sean and Friends - Mar 5

This morning Dave and I wandered around the area, looking at stores, cafes, real estate offices, buildings, a museum, and people.  We ended up walking through the temple grounds again as well. Dave was taking a photo of me and a passing man offered to take our picture, so now we can prove we were in Japan together (we tried selfies together a couple of times, and were unsuccessful - I blame Dave's fused neck, which doesn't allow him to look up at the camera).
Sean arrived and we went across the street to our lunch reservation. Craig (originally from Regina, but has been here 12 years, married with a little girl), Go (from near Tokyo, married) and Daisake (from further south in Japan) all joined us. It was nice to finally meet those friends Sean keeps talking about. Unfortunately I forgot to take their picture, so no one else gets to know what they look like. The restaurant we had booked was a tempura restaurant, and in order to reserve we had to pre-order a set meal. So we had an extensive Japanese meal, from the bean and sardine-like appetizers, through lots of tempura (including shrimp, sea bream, something Go's translation program said was abductor muscle, long green beans, and so on). After two courses of tempura, we got a bowl of rice and some miso soup, with more tempura (kind of a shrimp nest) on top. Finally green tea and a little custard for dessert. We took the 2 hours they had estimated we would take, and were all stuffed. But it was really tasty (though I never ate my shrimp things, Dave seemed to have no problems eating two of them, so I assume they were also good).
So after 3 p.m. we came back to the hotel for a nap. Since we begin our travels tomorrow we just took it easy the rest of the day, and started packing things up a little. Tomorrow we basically just take the bullet train to Osaka and check into a hotel to join our small tour group.