Added a few more photos to folder.

Well today we all get up to meet vocal, some people aren’t ready on time so we have to delay meet up an hour. Get a load of trains once again. This time we also get the monorail over the rainbow bridge which was pretty cool. Much smaller inside that the trains, kinda reminds me of London Underground. Arrive and we are meeting vocal at the Statue of Liberty. It’s much smaller than the other ones, guess the french cheaped out on the one they sent to Japan. Vocal isn’t around yet, so wait a few mins and he shows up. We go into a shopping centre while we decide what to do. Nice and cool inside, amen for air con. Is a big dragon inside advertising the new Monster Hunter game, obviously grab some photos of it. Grab some food, a few of us try the local BK, Whoppper is best thing I’ve tried from a western outlet so far. Rest go eat some Japanese stuff. Afterwards girls want to go shopping so holo and jecht go off with them. Vocal stays with us and asks what we want to go see, he suggests a few things in the local area, so we set off to go see them.

First stop is the life sized Gundam, Vocal knows a far bit about it, so we basically get a guided tour. Looks cool as fuck, take a load of photos. Apparently there’s a Gundam amusement park on the roof too, but we decide against going there in favour of seeing more stuff. Next up we start heading to the Toyota car showroom, vocal say’s it’s the largest one in the world, so might as well go see it. Before we get there we decide to take a side trip into Venus Fort.

Venus Fort is a shopping centre aimed at woman, inside it kinda looks like France I guess, with columns and French street names. The ceiling is pale blue with clouds on it, as you walk it looks like the clouds are moving too, pretty nice stuff. Loads of shops, we decide to stop for a crepe and ice cream at one of them. So sit down for a while and talk about stuff with vocal. Decide we best move on if we want to go see more stuff, so carry on. Grab a quick look at the fashion show that’s currently on in the centre, don’t stay for long then head outside again. Still hot as hell outside, don’t know why I keep expecting it to have cooled down. Make our way over to the Toyota showroom.

Quick look around the showroom and vocal convinces us to try out the driving machines. Basically you queue up and get a go on a driving sim, you get 2minutes or something in two modes. First mode is a basic car with no assisted stuff, hard to drive. Second time they turn on all the abs, trc and stuff so you can see the difference. We wait in line and watch the people before us. Some guy gets like SSS rank or something ridiculous, suspect he goes there daily. Some loli goes up next and she just puts her foot on the accelerator and goes for it. Doesn’t touch the brake for 4mins, hits pretty much every wall going, want to laugh but suspect I’ll be just as bad.

TT goes up, gets vocal to film him doing it. Stefl goes in 2nd machine, somehow manages to score worse in the assisted mode than unassisted mode. Vocal takes his turn along side teg, Vocal manages an S rank on assisted mode and comes 4th overall. Teg gets SS rank on assisted but comes 8th overall, vocal beat him on speed. I get to go last with everyone telling me how to do stuff while standing next to me. Not distracting at all. Totally fail the first round and get a D, manage to redeem myself with an S for 2nd round though. Time to go meet up with everyone else now, so off we go. Spot a pikachu car on way out, grab a few photos. Walk back to first shopping centre, get there a few mins late, find rest of group, girls still shopping… again.

So minus two of the girls we head over to Tokyo TV building, pay the 500 yen to go up to the 24th floor ball and look around. No one is impressed with it, way out is confusing, end up walking around the entire floor to get to the back of the queue for the elevator. End up getting split up mulitple times. Eventually all meet back up outside first shopping centre with holo having to go off and rescue odin and stefl.

Decide to go for food while girls shop, go to some raman place up on top floor, turns out to be best raman so far, soup actually has a nice flavour to it, and is a decent sized portion. No English menus but guy there speaks perfect English, so no trouble ordering anything. Eat up and go meet the girls. Tell them how awesome Venus Fort was compared to this place and tell jecht about the gundam 😀

Next on our hit list is Tokyo Tower, is a fair bit away so monorail back across the bridge and a train later we set off walking there. Girl group lags behind again, so rest of us carry on. Get there, is a huge queue, some of us get another crepe and then we queue up. Some guy comes talks to vocal, apparently we are queuing for wrong thing. So go to right place and get served straight away. We have to pay to get to the 150 metre floor, and if we want to go up to the 250 metre floor we have to pay again once we get up to 150m. Not cool! We do it anyway. Get to top floor, vocal tries to take some photos, but we can all feel the tower swaying as we stand up there, so he can’t get any decent pics. Unimpressed we go back down to the 150m floor. Spend a couple of hours here, vocal tries to get some more photos, tower is swaying less down here, but the lights are reflecting on the glass so much it makes it hard to get a good picture. Teg jumps a few timers on the glass for to test it’s safe, better safe than sorry after all. It’s almost closing time now so we go down and I grab some more sweets for family. We go outside get a few pictures outside and then go back to station. Arrange to meet up with vocal tomorrow so he can show me his favourite places in Akihabara and he heads off home before his trains stop. I head back to hostel, I really want to cool down and shower, everyone else goes off for more food. Teg also decides he cba to go eat, so we both stop by a 7/11 and get some snacks then back to hostel. Stay up way to late again chatting on IRC to rest of Doki staff.

So get up and get our shit together need to catch early train so we can get everything done. To train station we go and on to the main Kyoto station. Stash our bags and stuff in lockers there and then grab a shinkansen to Osaka. Get there and we head for the aquarium, get inside and split up since there’s quite a lot of people in here and hard to stay as a group. See some otters, dolphin, seals, penguins, fish fish and more fish, some crabs and sharks.  Get a bit wet in the stroke the fish section some how. Go to toilet, once again no dryers in the toilet, so just got to deal with been wet for now. Finish looking around with nearly two hours left before we planned to meet back up. So we decide to go get food from the nearby mall. I try dry off in the sun for a bit first then we go inside. Go straight to the central food court. Decide to be brave and try something exotic. So I go for KFC, odin goes for subway and teg goes for KFC too. Finish up, look around the shops, they are crap, nothing really catches my eye. Go back outside and sit on a bench. A street performer starts doing his stuff nearby, so I go sit on the floor in the front with all the kids. He’s pretty good and entertaining. Eventually the crowd gets a bit bigger  and he starts to involve them in the routine, and then holo comes to collect me to meet up with everyone else. So I miss the end of it 🙁

Holo says he has found taiyaki stall, so we go there, time to cross something else off my list of things I wanted to do. I decide on the chocolate one, cos red bean isn’t actually very nice. It’s really nice, so I get a 2nd one. Teg gets a 2nd one too, but decides to get red bean. Says it’s crap and doesn’t finish it. Dodged a bullet there. I go buy 2 more chocolate ones for later on and then we go catch a load more trains to go feed deers in Nara.

Once we get to Nara we head up the street to the park looking for deer and spot our first one just casually chilling on the side of the road. Soon after 3 more are crossing at a zebra crossing which amuses us. Then we reach the park and go inside. Is a few more deer here and then walk on over to us. We don’t have much food with us, since we expected there to be a guy selling deer cakes or something. But since it’s afternoon and this is Japan everything is already closing. So we settle for giving them random food we have with us. Jecht’s gf has some in a bag which she starts feeding them, and the biggest deer decides to just rip the bag out of her hands and shake it till food comes out. We all back off a bit. Another deer snatches TT’s bag that doesn’t have any food in it. Then holo starts to feed them some left over taiyaki, decides to keep moving with it and pretty much gets chased around by 4 deer while we all lol at him. Running out of time now, so we need to get back to the JR line and catch a train back to Tokyo. Nara > Kyoto and grab our bags.

Then shinkansen back Tokyo. Train back is so embarrassing. We spot a girl sat to our left and forward, she’s playing a game on her phone. Then she leaves her bag and bottle of tea behind and goes. Comes back a while later and takes her bag and goes again. She’s gone for quite some time, so we assume she has gone. Jecht decides her tea looks nice so grabs it and comes back with it. A little while later I notice she’s back in her seat and looking around at us. At this time holo is drinking her tea, so teg and I are like er… she’s back and looking. Holo tries to hide the evidence in between the seats, there’s not even a gap there but he tries to force it in. Meanwhile I can’t stop laughing. Teg spots her learn around and take a photo of us all. So probably a photo of us on some Japanese site now tagged as the guys whole stole my tea. So embarrassing and can’t stop laughing. Eventually the girl who is selling stuff comes back through the coach and sara buys another bottle of tea for the girl, but jecht doesn’t want to give it to her, cos he feels no guilt lol. So his gf is like “geez, I’ll do it, how do I say sorry in Japanese”. Goes over says sorry, points at us all and gives her the bottle of tea. Apparently she looked pretty surprised about it, but she drank it and thankfully got off at the next stop. Rest of the trip was uneventful save for having to call the hostel and explain we’d be late arriving for checkin.

Get back to hostel late, checkin, is a problem with the rooms, they have double booked up one of our rooms, so holo, jecht and gf’s have to sleep in the owners house for the night. Several of us go out for a chinese, it shuts at 1am, so we have an hour still, get there and the guy recongises holo from 2 years ago. Stefl tries Kanades favourite food, the mapo tofu. Rest of us go with rice dishes. Eat my first ika in my rice… Not quite as bad as I expected, but not exactly awesome. Guy stays open past 1am for us to finish and then we leave and it’s time for bed.

Comment by Stefl1504 – “Nyan~”