TOKYO TIME: 11:05AM SATURDAY

so we’re getting close to the end and faring much better with successful activities, although we still seem to be foiled in about half of the things we want to do. only now we’ve just learned to accept it and roll with it. tried to return to the palace gardens again and they had closed about an hour before, so we went to tokyo tower instead. tried to go wednesday night to a bar we saw in a book we borrowed from jen, and couldn’t find it, so we went to another bar. that bar was a late-night only bar and wouldn’t even let us in at 10:00, so we went to a great funky/artsy american bar and had a great time. thursday we went to get lunch at a sushi place from another guidebook, to find out it had been turned into a familymart convenience store, so we went to the sushi place two doors down and it was awesome. then yesterday we looked and looked for a ‘maid cafe’ in akihabara, finally found the one i saw online, and it wasn’t open for lunch, so we ended up at some other one we just happened to see from the street on the 7th floor of a building a few blocks away… man, those places are so weird and cute-overloaded. sadly they didn’t let you take pictures though, but their website might give you some idea.

we’ve had more success stories though too, like making it to the super-funky church restuarant called ‘christon cafe’ where we ate bizarre versions of american food — my ‘fried pizza’ looked sort of like a calzone, but was really doughy and only contained tomato sauce and a runny egg inside instead of anything you’d think of as pizza-related. we’ve seen the famous shibuya crossing both in daylight and at night. we rode a train out to the suburbs and saw a huge buddha statue from 1252AD, and even went inside it. we strolled the electronics area in akihabara and stumbled into a cool hobby shop where i got another batman figure and some final fantasy VII ‘potion’ (i.e. soda) i’m not sure if i should even try to drink, and also mistook a place called ‘pop-life’ for a music/movie/comics store instead of the 7 floors of sex toys and pornography it actually was. also, we went to a cool discount store called don quijote where i got a neat butane jet lighter that looks vaguely like a lightsabre.

and then, of course, last night was kara-fucking-oke. oh man. but since you really need the pictures to get a feel for that, let’s just say that was an outrageous success thanks largely to the ‘all you can drink’ option…

couple more days to go, hopefully featuring the base of mt. fuji; the wild costume stylings of the teenagers in harajuku; a traditional sitting-on-floor-mats, 10-course japanese dinner; and if we’re really ambitious (and the weather cooperates) monday, closing out with the ninja museum, which we discovered is over three hours away and may not be practical. i mean, it is japan, technically there should be ninjas pretty much all over the place, and no need to take that long of a train ride, right?