A few more Tokyo photos

The presentation went smoothly, as expected. Not many questions, and I was able to answer those that I got using the V1R10 pubs that I have on my laptop. The class ended just before 4:00pm, and the class manager told me that was OK because the attendees get weary of focusing on the English.

I mentioned to him that I would like to get some sushi before leaving Tokyo, but I was nervous about going someplace and not knowing what to order. He graciously offered to take me to a place that he likes, and two others from the class joined us. We had a fantastic meal! The salmon was the most tender I had ever tasted, and I got to try a few new things too - one was a 'sweet' shrimp (raw), which was in fact sweet and very tender, and a broiled beef which was just very lightly braised, also very good. There were a couple other pieces of sushi that my hosts even didn't know the English name for... I was so full from that meal that I only ate one meal all the following day (yesterday).

Yesterday I bought an all-day subway pass and visited several areas of Tokyo that we did not visit on the bus tour - places that the tour guide told us about but did not stop at. First was the electronics district, Akihabara. There is a Tower Records store in the 7th floor of the Yodobashi Camera store in that district, and I needed to go there to get an audio CD of a Japanese band that my son wanted. Of course, it was raining, and I forgot my umbrella in the hotel room, so I had to jostle with the crowds for shelter from the rain, while walking past the electronics stores that line the streets:

Anime is Everywhere in Akihabara - DVDs, PC games, console games, there's even the Tokyo Anime Center, which I went to look at but wasn't open yet. I found the Yodobashi store and stopped at the entrance for a while, because they were selling these tiny laptop PCs for $100 (like the Dell Inspiron Mini and the Acer Eee PC). I actually tried one of the display models, opened up Wordpad and tried to type on the tiny keyboard. My fingers aren't that big by any means, but the keys were SO small I had a very hard time typing, and the 9" screen was sharp but too small for me.

Anyway, next stop was across the Rainbow bridge to the man-made island Odaiba. They have a scaled-down replica of the Statue of Liberty there:

They also have a giant ferris wheel, and some other neat architecture:

I thought about spending some time in the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, but my cold symptoms started to catch up to me, so I decided to get back on the subway and rest a bit.

Next stop was a section of town called Roppongi:

There's a huge modern upscale shopping center connected to the subway stop called Tokyo Midtown. To me, the best part of that shopping center was the Starbucks - I desperately needed to refuel! There's supposedly great night-life there too, but I was there in the mid-afternoon, so not much was going on. I passed by a pet store there, and there were some puppies in the window. They must've been pure-bred, because they were about $1500 each.

The coffee didn't help much, so I went back to the hotel and rested a bit. I went back out to get a couple photos of Akihabara at night, then decided to quit for the day. I went back to the hotel and had a couple beers at the bar at the top of the hotel. What a pleasant surprise - it actually had a very nice view of the skyline, including the Tokyo tower, which was lit up orange: