fish, water and much more!

We made it up at 4 a.m.! We were exhausted but we did it. After getting dressed and ready we looked out the window to see that it was lashing rain. :( But since we were up and ready we had to go on with our plans.

It sucked though getting out in the rain. we were both drenched with umbrellas by the time we got to our first train. There is a typhoon or cyclone or something off the coast of Japan right now, so that is probably going to be bringing us lots of rain for our last few days. so sad!

The fish market was chaos! There are tons of these little carts that they whip around in, scooters and push carts, along with the people all over. I thought we might die by those automated vehicles!! But we made it inside and went through all the lanes. It was massive. And there were fish galore... so much of it that we didn't recognize at all. But tons of HUGE tuna's, octopus, shrimp, etc. We had fun pottering around taking photos and trying to stay out of the way of the carts. One cart was reversing and asked us to move.. as he shifted his attention to us for a moment, he ran into a huge stack of styrofoam boxes. oops! we walked off quickly!!

The plan was to eat sushi after the market as it's supposed to be the freshest in Tokyo. But folo wasn't too interested in that after seeing all the live and just dead fish! hah. so we went to our favorite breakfast - mcDs! Looking out the window at the insane rain and wind, we decided to head back to the hotel and sleep for a few more hours in the hope that the rain would chill when we woke up.

Off to sleep at 8 a.m.! And amazingly when we woke up at noon, the rain was gone. Happy day. We thought the day was going to be a mess, but it turned out to be quite nice - not sunny, but cool and dry. Our first stop of the afternoon was the Sony Building. It's 6 floors of Sony gadgets that you can play with and learn about (stuff that has/hasn't been released). Folo had fun of course! Next stop was the Leica gallery. I was really looking forward to that, but it ended up not being that interesting. Oh well... Back on the train one stop to the Tokyo Advertising Museum. We love old Chinese and Japanese ad's so this was a big highlight. And it's amazing.. the coolest things to do here seem to be free! We spent a long time in this museum checking out the posters and then watching commercials. The whole area where the museum was located was very arty and just a cool area.

Next stop... Harajuku for an amazing Mexican dinner. Both of our guidebooks say that this place is the best mexican in tokyo. We didn't have high high hopes, but it was amazing from the first step inside. We had to walk down about 3 flights of spiral stairs - all the walls were stucco looking and very mexican feeling. We were the first guests of the night - which was fine with us. We just enjoyed the beautiful restaurant and the real live mexican mariachi band!! I even got to speak some spanish to them. They come over from Mexico for 6 months at a time. And the chef is from Mexico. It was seriously a yummy dinner. I ate so much I was about to be sick.. like really. I could hardly breathe!! It was also our most expensive dinner in Japan, but worth it for the excellent Mexican food... for a few hours we got to pretend we were in Latin America!

We had to walk off all that food, so what better way than window shopping! Paul actually bought a few tshirts and we scoped out some more shops that we'll go to tomorrow.

So our rainy yucky morning turned into a pretty cool day. We feel like we've been in Tokyo forever now and we still have 3 days to go. So now we can just visit a little bit each day and focus on shopping which is what we wanted to have time to do. yeah!!