Tokyo Bay, Tokyo

Tokyo Bay is worth a day trip. The views are lovely, the trails are nice, and there are some impressive buildings, a few nice statues, and a couple museums.
Palette town will keep you busy for hours. It includes 3 very expensive malls, the cleanest MacDonalds I have ever been in, and the Tokyo Megaweb Exhibition.
If you have any interest in cars, you should check it out. Admission is free, and the few activities with a price tag are pretty cheap.
Visit the History Garage Museum to see famous and quirky old vehicles, view the concept car display, learn about hybrid engines and handicap accessability options, and take a ride in a car that drives itself! You'll exhaust yourself before you see everything.
Before it gets dark, make sure you take a ride on one of the world's largest ferris wheels. If you're lucky and have the stomach for it, you might even get a glass-bottomed compartment.

Ginza, Tokyo

This is someone's legal home. There's power hook-up, and a washing machine and tiny garden by the door. This is in Ginza, the riches district in Tokyo. This windowless tin shack is surrounded by extravagant high-rise condos and shopping complexes.
The Imperial Detached Garden was once used by the Emperor and his family to fish and hunt ducks. It has a salt water pond fed by the bay. This was the image I had in my head of a "Japanese Garden". It was picture-perfect and felt surreal with the sky scrapers looming behind it.

Land of Plastic Sushi

Kappabashi-dori is the main street of the restaurant supply district in Tokyo. For anyone who enjoys cooking, this is window shopping at it's best.
And with some shops we definitely stuck to the windows, as it would have been very dangerous to enter the narrow isles stacked with multiple Jenga games of pottery. Our backpacks would have set off a nasty chain reaction for sure.

I bought a pair of the largest cooking chopsticks I have ever seen. They are like cheerleading batons.

Our favourite shops were the plastic food stores.

Japanese restaurants often have displace cases out front, filled with plastic versions of their dishes rather than menus. You can get anything from ice cream cones and chocolates to watermelons, to frothy beer and 3-foot long fish. I thought the forks twirling pasta, suspended above their plates were pretty amusing.

We brought home some delicious looking plastic sushi to put on our fridge as magnets.Japan is filled with unusual art in places you would never think to look. I'm not sure what this giant beetle was all about, but it sure caught my eye sitting on the front of this apartment building.

Tokyo Hospitality

At this point in my travel journal some pages have fallen out and shortly thereafter I gave up writing at all. Here is my last entry, and then I'll try to jog my memory with a few photos of my last week in Japan.

We were again searching for a restaurant down a dark street armed with 'directions', but no address or map. This one was supposed to be an 'all tuna' restaurant, and examples of menu items had really excited my tastebuds. If we had the name in kanji, it would have been easier. Everything looked so non-descript and similar on the outside. We had a strong suspicion that it was a small place we found just around the corner on a side street, but peeking inside, and making note of people's attire as they came out, we felt most definitely under-dressed.

And rumpled.

And sweaty.

And grumpy and tired from walking all day.

We gave up and decided to head back to the train station for fast food, walking on the other side of the wide street in case we found the real restaurant on the way.

We passed a yakitori stand I decided to ask the salary men sitting at the make-shift counter if I could take their picture. They thought this was hilarious and posed several times for me (unfortunately, my simple digital camera and shaky hands are not a good mix at night).

They invited us to join them and asked us all kinds of questions about how we liked Japan - in English, of course. The cook was a high spirited guy and enjoyed showing off for us. He teased us and embarrassed his daughter.

An older couple making the rounds joined us. They gave us sabisu (complimentary refreshments). We sat there and made as much conversation as possible. They all acted politely amazed whenever I used a japanese word. We ate our chicken skewers, drank sake and ate tiny bowls of macaroni salad (?).

The older gentleman kepts putting his hand on my shoulder, which I guess is getting quite fresh in Japan. The others kept scolding him and his wife cuffed him.

A Vancouverite who lived in the building above came by and promised to keep him in line. I guess this guy had a reputation!

It feels so good when the local people invite you into their world. This is the only way to travel.