Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 2 - 634 m above sea level

Our original plan was to visit Nikko today. We came to our senses pretty early on yesterday and changed the plan to visiting the Sky Tree:

At 634 m in height, it is the tallest tower in the world by about 20 m. Here is a slightly closer shot:

It is quite impressive. In order to go up it, you need to first procure a time card. On it is a half hour window if time that you need to return in in order to stand in line for a ticket. So when we first arrived at 10:30, we got cards for 12-12:30. So we went over to Sensouji:

Where we learned our fortune:

Which was really bad for Rich and me, but ok for my mom. In order to dispell bad luck, you are supposed to tie the fortune to something, like this:

The fortune telling process is simple - first you shake a wooden cylinder, then remove a stick from it. On the stick is printed a number. You open the drawer with that number and pull out that fortune. It is called 'mikuji':

Sensouji is a Buddest temple, but right next door was a Shinto shrine:

Actually, this was the shrine next to the other one, but I failed to get a good picture of the first one.

After shrine hopping, we returned to the Sky Tree,seeing this strange vehicle on the way:

The ticket line was long, but fast moving, so less then a half hour later we were 345 m above Tokyo. But that wasn't good enough for us. So we paid the extra $10 a person and went another 105 m to the top. Behold:

It was kind of fun to try and pick out things in the landscape. We found Sensouji, the Imperial Palace, Tokyo Tower, and the Edo-Tokyo museum. 

At this point were we all rather tired and quite hungry. My mom demanded sushi and was seconded by Rich. I told them ok, as long as I could get something at a store later. So we went here:

There are about three more seats at the bar outside of the picture, but otherwise this is the entire restaurant. For about $10 each, my mom and Rich got these:

I hate most water dwelling foods, so I didn't get anything. I did end up eating my mom's tamago (egg) sushi, tried a bite of the nori wrapped roll, ate some ginger, and drank two bowls of miso soup that had clams in them. By the end of the meal I wasn't that hungry anymore.

So we went to Ginza to visit the Apple store so I could see the different colors for the new iPhones.

The streets were blocked off from moter traffic and full of pedestrians. We looked around a bit, but Ginza is the upscale shopping district of Tokyo and no one was really interested in it. So we left.

On the way to Ginza we saw Kabukiza, a famous kabuki theater. People were starting to gather for the next show, and some were all dressed up for it:

We stopped by a grocery store on the way back to our hotel for dinner and breakfast. Everyone felt like sleeping by 7, but my mom wanted to soak in the hot tub, so we enjoyed a nice visit to the Whirlpool & Sauna at the neighboring hotel (the hotel we are at is part of a chain and there are four of them practically right next to each other in this area). Now we are on our way to enjoying a nice visit with Our Pillows.