(Ahem. I forgot about you. I’m sorry. I promise I’ll be better. Happy Holidays!)

***

I’ll warn you, day four of Tokyo was relatively uneventful (and THIS is why.) After all the partying and wandering around that we had done our bodies were basically screaming at us to take it easy for a little while.

After arriving back at our hotel at four in the morning the night before, we passed out hard and woke up at noon. When we got up, we were getting dressed and planning our trip to the Tokyo Sky Tree when we realized that it was raining.

I also was in the beginning stages of a meltdown. We had yet to really catch up on sleep (let’s not forget that we stayed up for 48 hours before we got on the plane) I was a little overwhelmed by …well, everything… and so I was starting to feel like this:

Napkin and I talked about it and decided to take our rainy afternoon and turn it into an “off day.” We promptly went back to bed and slept the entire rainy afternoon away. Like literally. We crawled out of bed at five in the afternoon or so and, I don’t know about Napkin, but I felt like a thousand yen. We sort of piddled around for a second before we realized that it was five in the afternoon and we hadn’t eaten anything. WE WERE STARVING.

You’ll hear a lot about the Isetan Department Store because it was fabulous and close by… and so, it will come to no surprise to you that we decided to hit up Isetan for dinner. We had experienced the crazy gourmet basement cafeteria the previous day so we decided that we would try the top floor restaurants this go round. Napkin had done some serious research on Japanese style pizza and we really curious to try it, so on our way to Isetan we stopped by Shakey’s Pizza to see if there were any vegetarian options.

Nope.

They did have a lot of squid ink options though. …To Isetan we went. We found a super nice Italian place named AGIO (the Japanese love Italian food and it is nothing like you would imagine) and quickly ordered a margherita pizza and potato gnocchi.

I wasn’t ready for how good it was.

You’ll have to forgive my hair in the photo below, I was tired and didn’t realize I looked like a busted unicorn.

This was some of the most decadent pasta I’ve ever had. Seriously. I’m still recovering.

 

Pizza is so funny in Japan. Despite appearances, this tasted almost healthy compared to what we Americans are used to.

 

After dinner, we decided to go to Akihabara. It was only a few train stops away from Shinjuku and is known for its electronics, arcades and maid cafes so we figured, if anything, we would be mostly indoors (it was still raining.) We hopped on the Yamanote line and trucked over that way!

Hey, Akihabara!

 

Akihabara is basically where you go to get your nerd on. It was raining when we got there so the foot traffic was light (compared to what we were used to at this point) but there are TONS (and I mean TONS) of arcades. And when I say arcade, I don’t mean the corner pocket of the movie theatre lobby where we can play Big Buck Hunter and Soul Calibur— I mean six story buildings dedicated to gaming.

That sega building? All games.

 

Of course we decided to go. On the first floor of almost all of these arcades are the UFO catcher floors or (collect all of these cute things because why not? floor) Here’s an example:

Mushrooms? I LOVE YOU!

 

As you go further up the arcade floors, the games get more serious:

(That’s a line of people waiting to play something very serious.)

 

As I was walking around I noticed something interesting:

Take a look at the right side of this sign! There are four bathrooms for men throughout the building but only one for women! And it’s on the cute cuddly game floor! Isn’t that wild?!

 

Anyway, I noticed that it had stopped raining.  After a bit of serious game playing I had to drag Napkin kicking and screaming (that’s a lie) out of the arcades so we could walk around. Anime is king in Akihabara and we started noticing a lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion ads everywhere. (There’s a new Eva movie out, by the by.)

I really loved that anime back in high school (yeah, I was that girl) and so I stopped to take a picture with this cut out of Asuka Langely.

(Shoes from yesstyle.com)

It was only after I posted it on Instagram and got a billion likes that I realized that Asuka and I are the same height, our hair is the same color and I am wearing red pants?! To match her suit?! I’m thinking of moving to Japan to become the live action version of anime characters who shows up at parties. Or something.

We wandered over towards an Electronics store and decided to look around for a little while. Nothing was too terribly exciting about the inside of the store– except for the escalator:

Someone needs to tell Best Buy to redesign their stores to look like this?! I would visit them every day.

See!? Fun!

Afterwards, we just mingled with the hordes of people that were on the street (rain lets up, Japan gets crowded. That’s just the way it goes.) It was our “off-day” after all and so we trucked it back to the hotel around eleven in order to get (another) full night’s rest.

 

Say goodbye, giant Mecha head on top of random building in Akihabara!

“Goodbye!”