So sad that our last day came so quickly. We spend the morning visiting the Tokyo Google office and Alec’s Sysop friends. We had a great time and had some of the Japanese mysteries explained to us. No-one could explain what the mystery slime that kept appearing on our food was however.

We then caught the monorail to Odabia, a man-made island that is an entertainment district. We didn’t have much time so we only went to one place, Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Alec in particular really enjoyed the museum, particularly because of the robots.

The airport was our next stop and then finally home the next morning.

Today was my turn. We started the day in Harajuku, which is where all the trendy boutiques are. It’s kind of like Newtown. I found an awesome little shop where I bought a few very pretty vintage lace things. Maternity-style lace dresses are all the rage here. While it looks awesome on tiny skinny girls, it looks stupid on a tall medium white girl.

After Harajuku we stopped in Shibuya to see the statue of Hachiko, a famous dog, and to see the also famous Shibuya crossing – a five-way crossing streaming with hip teenagers.

Next stop was the Tokyo metropolitan Museum of Photography where they had three exhibitions: Surrealism and Photography: Beauty Convulsed; Mariogiacomelli; Secrets Unveiled Images from the Forbidden City. All very cool, particularly the first two.

After our cultural stop we caught the subway to Roppongi Hills and rode up 52 floors to the Tokyo City View – a 360 degree view of Tokyo. The weather turned bad unfortunately, so it was really cloudy with poor visibility, but we still waited for the sun to go down and watched all of the lights turn on. Beautiful!

We decided to take turns in a manner of speaking, at deciding what to do each day. Today was Alec’s day, so we went to the Imperial Gardens, where they had beautiful flowers in the castle ruins. We then focussed on electronics.

We started at the Sony building – seven of so floors of Sony electronics – for Alec to try on their super-wizz-bang headphones, and then to the Apple store, where they had five floors of Apple wonderfulness.

Next was the electronics district where Alec found some games and gaming insanity all around, and ended it all up with going to our new favourite store, Bic Camera, for seven floors of electronics mayhem, which is where we bought a speaker set for our iPods/iPhones. Cool! MUCH shopping!