Mitsui Garden Hotel Prana Tokyo Bay Urayasu

... Jewel” bakery across the street with hot, fresh yeasty bread stuffed with any number of unusual fillings – bacon and potato salad, spicy hot dogs, onion and egg, just to name a few.

Japanese girls who come up to us and just stare and giggle like they are new to the planet and seeing other life forms for the first time.

Little children and old people who come up to the location and bow before the come to see Santa and ...

... old and new faces. Our Japanese friends are always surprised when we remember them. Already the lines are approaching 3 and a half hours wait time…that will only increase as the season goes on.

After work the other guys, and one of the ladies joined me for dinner with the Mano family. Those of you who have followed my adventures in years past know that they have a restaurant on the first floor of their home. They serve Shabu ...

... placed the tavern in Tokyo. Well, after some research Toshi was able to locate it but it was about 3 hours by car north of Tokyo! We made plans to go.   We arrived at the tiny little tavern run by a man and woman and two little monkeys! They are little Japanese Snow Monkey and are very cute! They helped "serve" us and danced around the restaurant eating from our hands and entertaining the children at the next table. Soon we were invited into another ...

... so it was a little weird for me being up so high. But I really wanted to see the observation tower so I headed up to the heighest point you could reach which was 250 m which is about 820 feet in the sky. But it was amazing up their once I saw all of the skyscraoers and towers and everyone look like ants at the bottom of the tower it was funny and I saw everything i was just so amazed at the view! So as I headed back down to the first floor to the ...

... there was little to look at. The result was a less fun, less thrilling ride that was a non-event after the lift. How I miss Hong Kong's modern take on this ride!

The plan was to progress around the park in an anti-clockwise direction, hitting the big rides for FASTPASSes as much as possible in advance to reduce our waiting times. To this end we found ourselves transitioning to Fantasyland and joining the extremely long queue for Winnie the Pooh FASTPASSes. How long? At least ...

... I hope to get pictures up soon. One contained a Memorial Hall, remembering victims of an earthquake and of the air raids in WWII. Inside, several older people were preparing flowers for a memorial service, and it was strange, as an American, to stand there watching them and to know that my country, my relatives, were involved in that action. The pictures of the destruction reminded me of Iraq. I kept thinking ...

... a little slipper necklace. Then from C.Castle we headed back to Fantasyland. At this point it was starting to get very grim. Drizzle, overcast (as usual. David pointed out that we haven't see the sun LITERALLY since being in Japan. Glad I didn't book a trip to Mt.Fuji). So we decided to do a fewmore rides then grab a smoked Turkey leg (oh yeah baby) and a Chip n Dale bucket of popcorn and make our way to the merchandise. Saw the Mickey Mouse Revue. Once again, knew the songs ...

... today my feet hurt! and walked around. Tuesday - (My feet still hurt) but I went to a near by park and it was pretty- I guess for Japan this park is HUGE but to me it didn't seem very big at all because I am use to seeing acres and acres of green. Wednesday- First I went with Satomi and Shin-chan to go drop off the soap that they had made at a friends salon. Then we went shopping- where they bought me a tiffany's necklace for my birthday ...

... sea creatures - the sea dragons. I took lots of pictures and spend a long time enjoying the aquarium. I also bought some keitai (cell phone) charms in the gift shop and took some purikuri pictures of myself (but I messed up the decorating part so they didn't turn out the best!). When I left the aquarium, I explored for awhile, including a shopping area in the basement where I found J-Honey, one of my favorite Japanese clothing stores. I bought an interesting ...

Tokyo. wow. totally overwhelming. 25 million people squeezed into a city the size of Auckland. mental. our two and a half days in Tokyo were jam-packed with activities and we are forever grateful to our doji Simon and beautiful Minako for being such amazing tour guides and hosts. without you, we could never have guided ourselves through such a crazy city. highlights included: the food! Mmmm, still dreaming about shab shab (not sure if we spelt that right but ...