Out and about.

Wow. The last three days have been busy. On Sunday, my parents landed in sunny Tokyo, so at two o'clock we met up at their hotel by Tokyo Dome. The tourist-friendly area surrounding said Dome contains many souvenir-shops, restaurants, a roller-coaster and a shopping mall, and so is worth a good walk around. We had lunch at the über-japanese establishment of Bubba Gump Shrimp, where I wolfed down my own weight in seafood (seemed like the thing to do.)

Afterwards, we headed towards Akihabara for more walking and general sightseeing. A proper, good japanese dinner finished Sunday off nicely.

Yesterday was busier still. We met up after my three hours of school and took the subway to Tsukiji, where one can famously sample the best sushi in the world (and that's a pretty realistic statement – sushi was invented and perfected in Tokyo, and in Tsukiji you can eat fish that's been dead for less than six hours.)

Great food, of course. But the sheer atmosphere of the place was just as satisfying.

Not one to waste time, I swiftly led the way towards the Rainbow Bridge, which leads to the artificial island of Odaiba. 

The plan was to walk across the bridge (a fairly ambitious scheme, in hindsight) but it was closed. So we took the monorail instead, which is obviously a lot cooler.

Odaiba itself is hard to judge after just one brief visit, but I do love the futuristic architecture of the Fuji TV-building, Tokyo Big Sight and The Museum of Maritime Science. 

And the Tokyo skyline from a kind-of-boardwalk café is not a bad view.

After all this fresh air and open space, we thought it more than appropriate to nose-dive straight into the heart of the metropolis for dinner. After a quick tour of Tokyo Tower (a 333 m imitation of the Eiffel Tower, with an extremely impressive view) we found a well-enough-looking restaurant in Ginza.

Though I'm not entirely sure why, because the entire menu was in japanese (which I understood some of, but not enough to make a confident decision about what to order.)

Anyway, it ended well with some grilled salmon, chicken and tuna, plus a sallad and some potatoes. 

Today was busiest of all. I wanted to take the folks to a Tokyo favorite of mine – the Brown Rice café in Omote-sando – so that was our first destination. After waiting for a table a bit too long, I got my hands on a vegan burger and a red fruit slushy of some sort. All was delicious, all was well.

This location also meant a close proximity to Harajuku, leading into Shibuya, and off we went for more easy strolling in the sunshine. We did some shopping (books, frying pans that look like Winnie the Pooh, colourful socks, etc.) and took several pictures of Shibuya crossing, like real tourists. I love it!

Today is St Patrick's day, so from Shibuya we took the train to Roppongi for Guinness and green hats at a very Irish pub. Really cool, and pretty random considering that I've never celebrated St Patrick's day before (but that's all about to change, now I've seen the fun-and-fancy-free that is catholicism, I'm like totally converted!)

We had dinner at Wolfgang Puck's, which is not very japanese at all, except for a pair of starters that pretty much blew my head off. I had some fish after that, which was also ridiculously good.

Pictures will follow.