Our Grand Adventure: More vacation fun!

Sunday
We woke at a reasonable hour and quickly packed our bags and took the subway to the Tokyo Marriott. Unfortunately, it was way too early to check in, so we dropped off our bags, ate breakfast in their restaurant and headed out to explore the new part of town we were in.

It was so hot and so humid, we didn't last long walking around. And little did we know, Japanese people must not like coffee! It was nearly impossible to find a cafe where we could pick up an iced latte or frappe.

Eventually we checked-in our new and very much improved room. It had two double sized beds instead of one king size, but I was so far from complaining. The room was the size of a real Western hotel room and it had a bathtub!!! We haven't been able to take a bath since we left home in December. We spent the remainder of the afternoon unpacking, napping, and showering, and relaxing in the comfort of our awesome new room, as well as planning what we wanted to do for the remainder of our time in Tokyo.

We headed out for a quick dinner of ramen noodles and tucked in early for busy days ahead!

Enjoying our ramen noodle dinner

Monday
I'll admit, the majority of our vacation days we slept in and got a pretty late start. Monday was no exception. We slept in our comfy, cozy beds and woke around 10am showered and headed down to breakfast at the hotel. By the time we ate, showered and were ready to go for the day, it was already halfway over.

"Pancakes"

We decided to head to one of Jacob's recommendations, the Akihabara neighborhood, famous for all things tech! We spent the afternoon wondering around Akihabara, moseying our way into arcades, tech shops, video game stores, and of course, anime stores!

We opted for a late lunch and then headed over to Yodobashi-- a giant Best Buy type of store. The store was nine massive floors of everything tech you could possibly imagine; TVs, home theaters, appliances, speakers, headphones, vacuum cleaners, phones, etc.

Since we weren't looking to buy anything, we didn't take longer than 5 minutes to walk through each floor and check out all the gadgets... until we found the massage chairs! Without a doubt the most incredible chairs I've ever had a privilege to sit in. I actually fell asleep getting a 30 minute whole body massage-- from the soles of my feet all the way up to my skull.

By the time we finished looking through the entire store, we were slightly disappointed. We were both expecting out-of-this-world type of technology, way more advanced than anything we would find in the States. Unfortunately, their most impressive technology was in the toilet aisle. Seriously, no country in the world knows how to do a toilet like Japan. Gone are the days of the boring one-handle flush feature! Now we have a bidet with several adjustable spray/direction/heat settings, heated toilet seats, different music settings, and I'm sure a million other things we can't even understand. In fact, we were listening to the radio and Japan is now developing a "computer toilet" that can test your urine or stool for pregnancy, sugars, protein and any other abnormality.

Anyway, after Yodobashi we got some spaghetti for dinner -- I was seriously craving Pomodoro pasta at this point in my pregnancy -- and headed back to our nice and spacious hotel room.

Tuesday
The Skytree was on the agenda for Tuesday! The Tokyo Skytree is a huge tourist attraction that can be easily compared to the Space Needle. The attraction has two observatory decks, a restaurant, and several restaurants and shops.

We spent a lot more time there than we had hoped. Unbeknownst to us, there is a HUGE wait to get up to the Observatory desk. Perhaps we should have spent a little more time planning our activities before we arrived...

Around 1pm we got our "wait time" ticket. The ticket said we had to wait until 4pm to get in line to buy tickets to get to the deck and then to get in another line to get up... we weren't going to get to the top until dinnertime!

We walked around the huge 8-story building wasting time until it was our turn to "get in line" for tickets. Two hours into our wait the fire alarm went off in the building and people started loading the escalators to head outside on the ground floor. We were on the 7th or 8th floor at the time and had a long way to go to the bottom. As we were descending we noticed half of the the people were talking, laughing and not concerned at all that we were being told to evacuate! By the time we reached the bottom and were two steps away from exiting the building, the alarm was turned off and someone announced everything was fine and that it was safe to re-enter the building. GREAT! Back up 8 floors, we go!

Since it was nearing our time to get in line to buy tickets, we headed back to the Skytree area and were directed to get in line. As we were in line waiting, we saw a tiny sign on a brochure stand that there was a "Foreigner Only" line located on the opposite side of the building. WHAT?!? I was furious.

We promptly got of line and I harassed an employee until we found the "Foreigner Only" ticket kiosk that had all of EIGHT PEOPLE in line. Foreigners were charged a little extra money, but it was totally worth it! After we bought the tickets we were at the observatory deck within the next 15 minutes.

The views of Tokyo were incredible! We even thought we saw Tokyo Disney! Eek! We then got in line and paid even more money to go the second, even higher, observation deck. We figure we might as well, we probably weren't ever coming back...