Being the intelligent and highly organised people that we are, we decided to set an alarm on Helen's phone this morning so that we could meet up with Becky in good time. The first problem with this was when Helen's phone ran out of batteries in the middle of the night, which was OK because we just reset the alarm on Sarah's phone. The next problem was that when the alarm actually did go off, we somehow managed to go back to sleep for another hour before actually doing anything....
We met Becky at Ueno station in the morning, then went to McDonalds to get something to drink and sit down somewhere air conditioned, because Sarah still wasn't feeling too good. After that, we headed down to the Senso-Ji Temple, heading past lots of cool little shops on the way, and stopping to take a photo of our favourite fluffy traveller.
After exploring the temple, we headed for something to eat. As it turns out, all Sarah needed to cure her was chicken pizza! Yay! We were back on our way, feeling refreshed and full of energy. Next we walked down to the river where we got some tea flavoured ice-creams, which were surprisingly nice, but also very very melty.
We went to Ginza after that and into the Sony Building, where we found some magical, musical stairs...literally! When you stand on a step, a light comes on at the side and it plays a note. When you stand on the next step, the light changes colour and the note gets higher! We then saw a little robo-beastie-type-thing that played Ricky Martin and sort of break danced along with it, doing little spins and lighting up different colours. We went to a kind of little HD cinema screen at the top of the building, which was showing previews of movies and games, which was very cool, until a 25 minute long show about the treasures of Egypt started up in Japanese...we left about two minutes in...
We did a little more exploring in Ginza, including going and looking at the Nissan showroom, and an old Kabuki theatre, before heading on to Shibuya. Just outside the station there was a statue dedicated to a dog that's owner died and it continued to go to the station to wait for him until it, too, died...kinda like Fry's dog in Futurama. Then we just wandered around taking in the atmosphere, and a couple of Krispy Kreme doughnuts for sustenance, before Sarah spotted a massive Disney store, which had an entire floor dedicated to Stitch! We wandered up to the top of the store, where we found out that we could buy our Disneyland tickets, so we did to save us a job on Friday. The woman on the counter even gave us a small discount =D
We wandered around some more, and after it got dark Becky took us to her favourite bit of Tokyo: the view of Shibuya from the top of a skyscraper. There's a slight chance we were trespassing, since it was actually the top floor of a swanky hotel, but no-one said anything about it and the sight was definitely worth the risk. For the journey down we took a glass lift that let us see out over the city as we dropped to the ground.
To finish off the day we found what was supposedly an 'American' bar, and tried our first taste of real Japanese food. Becky helped us order "chicken on a stick" (yakitori), "noodle-y stuff" (yakisoba) and "umm...pancake with stodge" (okonomiyaki), which were all very tasty and will probably become our foods of choice now that we know how to order them. After a couple of hours we decided it was late and headed back to the apartment to rest after a long but very rewarding day.
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