Travel Log: Day 76 (9/11), Tokyo Japan

The school day was normal today with the exception of once again pushing elective to the afternoon so we could get lunch ahead of the lunch rush. We’ve found even Lawson is kind of crazy at noon.

JC and I went on a date night to Popeye Beer Club. That’s the same place we went to previously, and we were eager to try it again now that we know how the ordering system works. We really ran up a tab on their weak drinks, about $84 total. I had something like two beers and three Moscow mules. It was really fun and I found it interesting because it felt like any pub in the US. Except everyone was Japanese.

We sat right next to a couple different sets of people. I had line of sight on two young professional women drinking just a bit away from us. It was fun just to observe what they do, and to take note of how many things we heard about decorum aren’t always true. They were talking loud, laughing loud, drinking a shit-ton, and so forth. We note these same things outside of a bar setting as well.

Travel Log: Day 77 (9/12), Tokyo Japan

For field trip Friday we decided to go walk around the parts of the imperial palace that were free and don’t require pre-planning. Avoiding pre-planning would come back to bite us. We walked the ~2.5 miles to get to the east gardens which is one of the free and open parts. We were surprised to find it was closed. I looked on their website as we stood there and found they are closed every Monday and Friday.

Pivoting from there, we had also been thinking of going to the Tokyo Tower, so we decided to head there. We took the subway rather than walking another few miles. The tower was pretty impressive in terms of height and aesthetics. We went through this little history section on the inside under the tower, which had pictures and facts from the building of the tower and the years that followed.

In another area under the tower there is a virtual reality experience called “RED” I think. Mercifully the guy who explained the cost and attractions spoke perfect English. We decided to do that for an hour and it was a ton of fun. They had full body interactive games like red light green light, one where you had to contort your body to fit through openings on a screen, and another that was essentially Gallaga where you throw virtual bullets with your arms. There was so much to do there that we didn’t even get to half of it in our hour time-slot.