Here we are at day 5, the last day of the tour. It was a tale of 2 days, one cold and rainy and one sunny. To start, it was the cold and rainy one. Today was the day we were to get dressed up as Mario characters, jump into a go cart and drive around the streets of Tokyo.
The top picture was everybody picking out their costumes before getting to our go karts. The second one was Sebastian (one of our many Aussies on the tour) and I in our costumes.
Here's our Princess Peach. (another one of the Aussie gang, her husband is in the first picture on the bottom left)
We then headed out to the streets of Tokyo.
We drove single file, but at stop lights we went into the double file. I'm on the left side 3rd one back. During our drive, our chase car with the rest of the group had broken down and we had to wait at a indoor Sega theme park.
If you look in the background you will see the rainbow bridge, the one we drove on...twice. The first time the rain was coming down so bad I couldn't see and had to take my glasses off, the return was much better, but colder.
Over all I had fun but if the weather was nicer, I would have had a much better and warmer time. I would recommend the experience if the weather conditions are ok. One interesting tidbit, people were taking photos of us driving down the road. :-) We were out about 3 hours and then made our way back to the hotel via train to warm up and get out of our wet clothes. Yes, I did buy a nice hot coffee in a can from a vending machine at the hotel.
After taking a hot shower I did a bit of shopping at the local Aeon mall store.
The store is 5 stories tall and has a bit of everything. They even have a play area in the toy department for the kids. I picked up a robot (R2D2) for one of the folks at work, some nice candy, and a cookie. I also cheated and stopped the McDonalds in the store food court.
Yes, even the McD's here have animated characters these on the placemats. Oh, I did find something interesting in the store...
Want some cream colllon????
While I was at the store, what did you know, the sun came out! Once I got back to the room and put away all the stuff I bought at the store, it was time to head out to Akihabra. One of the guys had a good command of the train system and wanted to pick up some stuff, Sebastian and I tagged along and picked up a few trinkets.
Akihabra looks better at night. Both Sebastian and Danny picked up bunches of stuff and I couldn't find anything what I was looking for. We stopped for some food at a restaurant where you cooked your food on a stone grill over an open flame. I had the ribeye and it came breaded (panko) and sliced into strips. While the meat was good, I should have tried the kobe beef for 6,000 yen. (that's roughly $55.00). While walking down the sidewalk we saw tons of ladies in maid outfits passing out leaflets for various maid cafes. While the food offerings were not the greatest, the main draw were the girls and their outfits. One of the stores had a maid cafe on one of the floors. We did find an out of the way store that had some of the first generation Transformer figurines and loads of older toys. There were a few arcades and getting the prizes from them was damn near impossible. Although one of the guys from California was the man, scarfing the figurines left and right. I wish I knew about this when we were there I would have asked him scarf a few for me as I ran out of change trying to get those freaking things.
After about 4 hours we made our way back to the train station and back to the hotel. I loaded up the suitcases for the flight back home as tomorrow was the last day in Japan.
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