Day 35 - Sunday July 26, 2009: Last Day in Tokyo

Woke up at 11 am!! Holy cow, we must have been tired. Everyone else in the hostel was gone and we missed breakfast, so we had chocolate buns from the 7-11.

Then we headed to Laox which is a huge electronics store. The whole neighborhood was more of what I expected from Tokyo; loads of people, loud, electronic gadgets everywhere, and anime stuff. In the store we sat down to watch spiderman on a big screen and kind of forgot where we were.

After that we headed to Kanda Myojin which supposedly had a gate with "outlandish creatures." What is should have said was "here is temple like every other with a red gate that has dragon carvings on it." Been there, done that, never have to spend an hour looking for that again.

Then we searched for the Koishikawa Korakuen garden which is the oldest in Tokyo. It took us a while and one Snickers stop in a different park (where we found the gem of a sign shown below)

It is hard to see, but the bottom right image reminds us not to kick trees.

The of course we were side tracked when we saw the Tokyo Dome and Amusement Park. We saw a lot of teens/young adults in costume here...we aren't sure why. They were all taking pictures of one another and not "hey we are friends, lets take a picture" they were hard core taking pictures, setting up shots and getting the right lighting and all that jazz.

We finally found the garden paid the 300 yen entry fee and fed crayfish with fishing poles, it was awesome. The garden was nice, lots of ponds with lillypads, fish, turtles, bridges, and stepping stones. We stopped on a bench and watched this guy with seriously a 3 foot lens on his camera frantically taking pictures. He noticed us and waved us over to take a look and he was taking pics of this tiny tiny bird all the way across the pond - who knew how he saw that one.

Then we went in search of Yasukuni Jinja but stopped for a snack at a convenience store and decided we didn't really care to see yet another temple so we headed back towards the Imperial Palace. We wanted to check out the Crafts Gallery, but by the time we got down there it was 5 pm which is when all that stuff closes. We looked at the park for a bit (Kitanomaru-Koen) and then started the long walk back to the hostel. (We didn't take a single train today!)

The walk took well over an hour. We stopped at a used book store. Then went to dinner at the same place as Friday night - the food wasn't that great, but it was the only place where we knew we could get free refills on drinks! We went back to the hostel and packed up to head home tomorrow!!