We had a full day lined up for our last day in Tokyo! After breakfast we walked over to the Imperial Palace and walked through the gardens there for a bit. If you've been to Europe and seen some of the opulent palaces those rulers lived in (looking at you King Louie!) then these grounds don't really stand out as anything overly impressive. Still pretty though! After that we made our way to the Asakusa area and the Sensoji Temple. This was a very busy area with lots of stalls selling food and trinkets, really cool place! Brian finally found his bean curd waffles (but not the custard filled ones, although he did find one of those in Kyoto:-D). The temple is impressive, even as a big tourist attraction it still felt like there was respect for those that wanted to pray.
After that we made our way to the Sumo Show which was a lot of fun! We did not participate in trying to wrestle them, although many people did (just wasn't up our alley lol). After that we had to head back over to Asakusa for our sushi making class. This was a lot of fun as well! Brian's sushi ended up turning out so well, they even said they might put our picture on the website haha! Haven't seen it yet, though! It was a fun activity, we talked to the German couple beside us throughout the evening. They were really young but they humored us haha.
We had eaten our sushi so we weren't hungry for dinner, so we made our way to Shinjuku to all the lit up buildings. This is a very cool sight to see at night! We capped off the evening with quite possibly the most interesting and also uncomfortable experience of the whole trip - the Golden Gai area. This is an area of Toyko with several streets (alleys?) full of tiny bars. Like bars that hold maybe 5 or 6 people if you really cram in there. It's so strange, I can't really explain how surreal it felt! We wandered around trying to find one where we wanted to go in, but I was so uncomfortable - how conspicuous can you be! We found one where we had a drink, there was like one other person in there and the bar tender spoke some English but he was very awkward. It was not comfortable, we left after our drink was finished. After that we found another place, it was called Brian's Bar so we thought we should try it! However, we walked into that one and someone was smoking (somehow smoking inside restaurants and bars is still allowed there?? One of the weirdest things!). We left and found another place where we had another drink. This bartender didn't have much English I don't think so she didn't talk to us which may have been just as well. It was a very interesting experience but if I'm being honest, I was quite happy to walk out of there and get the train back to the hotel! Quite a finish to our first stint in Tokyo!
Tomorrow - bullet train to Kyoto!
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