Day Three, Monday, Dec. 1st

Ate at the American Buffet today. What makes it American? Potato Animals!
I had a dolphin and a rhino. mmmmmm　美味しかったな～！

Before breakfast I found something for my dog Pepper back home at a Lawson conbini and then took out some money from the ATM at the post office.

The group's first place to go for the day was Sony Playstation Square Showroom. Basically there were a bunch of big widescreen HDTVs set up with previews and demos of PS3 games and PSP games. My favorite part was watching the trailer for Sonic World Adventure. The daytime stages look pretty awesome and i the song written by the guy from Bowling for Soup fit and flowed well with the game.

We then headed out to Tokyo Tower. Some people stopped for crepes outside the tower but I felt like waiting in order to try something else for lunch. So I headed to the tower earlier with Ari, Caleb, Richard, Ian, and Tomuro sensei.

The view from the top was pretty neat beacause it wasn't as high as the govt building we were in the other day so you could see the buildings more up close. I spotted the Fuji Terebi building right away off a ways in Odaiba. It was neat to recognize a location in Tokyo I had seen before but from a different spot much farther away.

We then rode the elevator up to the very top floor. There was a gap between the elevator and the floor so you could stare down and get a different sense of how high up you were.

Tokyo Tower like most places in Japan had their own happy mascots. Long oval shaped pink guys with antennas on their heads.

Next we grabbed some lunch. Most people got McDonalds, a couple people pizza from pizza-la, but I grabbed a matcha (green tea powder) waffle from the Pink Dot. It was really good.

We then split off into two groups. One that went to Arc System Works (game company) and another that went on tour with Tomuro sensei's friend Higuchi-san who is 70 some years old.

Tomuro sensei introduced him to me since I knew a fair amount of Japanese, but he had been traveling to and from the U.S. for his job in the past so he could actually speak english pretty well. A little broken but there was really no need for me to translate and for the most part he spoke to me in English. When I first met him I spoke a little Japanese but he answered back in English and Japanese. At the end he spoke to me in Japanese while we were at the Sony Showroom in Ginza, but other than that we used english.

He's a really nice guy though. He first tried taking the group to the Imperial Palace to see the gardens but they were closed so he then took us to Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens.

It used to be the gardens of a daimyo from the Mito shogun family in the past. It was beautiful. Some great color in the leaves even though the prime fall season has ended.

It's actually been really warm here considering what I'm used to back home for this time of year. I really only need my hoodie and a long sleeve shirt underneath and I'm fine.

Higuchi-san later brought us to Ginza. He described it asthe 5th avenue of Tokyo. I found a UNIQLO and headed in to find another hoodie like my blue one. After that Dan, Irvin and I went further down the street and found a toy shop.

I got in a little Japanese practice here as Irvin asked me to check with someone working their if they had the Luffy wearing dragonball clothes figure and if they didn't when stores might be getting them in.

It was an interesting experience because as I slowly brought up the topic with her she seemed to only listen to what I had to say. I didn't receive much verbal response, but she didn't ask any questions and proceeded to look. Of course she did respond but it was minimal, so I guess I did a pretty good job of explaining everthing to her. Anyways they didnt have the figure and she said that it's one that might stay as a ufo catcher prize.

For dinner after getting back that night I had wakame udon, kabocha tempura, and a piece of konyaku. I took off the fried breading from the kabocha since I didnt feel like eating it.
The Udon was really good though!

It kind of felt like a cafeteria line and the way the tofu was prepared it looked exactly like what they had at the cafeteria at Kansai Gaidai.

I really like how Japanese food fills you up but never feels too heavy like so many restaurants in the states.

After exiting there was a standing sushi bar filled with businessmen. There are also a lot fo older business men who frequent the arcades after work. One guy who had to be in his 30s or 40s was playing Arachnoid which is a breakout type game.

While Irvin tried to win his one piece-dragon ball figure at the sega arcade later that night, dan and I played some typing of the dead. It was pretty fun. The characters were wearing dreamcasts with a giant batter on their backs and had a slinged keyboard hanging in front of them.

Later on the three of us got lost in a yodobashi camera as we didnt realize that the store was separated into 4 or 5 different buildings with multiple floors. Plus two of those buidlings were connected while the others were in different spots.
We didnt look at the map closely enough at first. We thought we were heading to a new toy capsule place but it turns out that the toy capsule floor was in the building we entered the first night.