Today I pen this post in Sublime from the start, so even if I close the window, my post will be saved.

Our "plan" for this trip has been somewhat haphazard; nothing concrete but some bullet points. The rest is left to fate. I think yesterday's excursions proved just how well this methodology can work. We've hit upon a little pattern to our madness: Akihabara every other day and touristy, sight seeing in between. Yesterday fell very much in the latter bucket.

The first stop of the day was to the Burger King next to the train station. Breakfast seems to be American-ish. Chris had himself a Spam breakfast sandwich, Jeff an.... I don't remember, and I had a sausage cheese hamburger. It had a lot of mayonaisse on it, but was otherwise pretty delicious, if not entirely too small.

Upon completion of breakfast, we set out on foot to the Tokyo Skytree, the second largest structure in the world. The walk itself was pretty decent, and it was a little scenic too.

The line to get up to the top seemed impossibly long, but in reality was dealt with in impressive time. After another wait in live, we were stuffed (almost literally) into an elevator that would take us ~1150ft in the air in what would be the smoothest elevator ride ever. If it hadn't been for the growing pressure in my ears, I wouldn't have known we were moving at all. The ride took all of fifteen to twenty seconds and when the doors opened, this is the sight we were greeted with:

And then we walked to the edge and saw this:

After much gazing out upon the tiny world, we took yet another elevator up another some ~300ft to the top of the tower.

The tower down and checked off the list, we headed out to Ueno, not entirely intentionally. We were actually planning on going somewhere else (which has now been postponed) and knew that there was a connect in Ueno. But, I'd also heard of a thing called "Ueno Park" in a podcast I listen to, so we stepped off here.

The first order of business was to begin arguing about what to do for lunch. Having seen a karaoke place, I suggested we go there because they probably served food. After many emphatic "no"s and and attempt to argue that it was cultural, we began arguing about American food and whatnot. We then stumbled upon a restaurant that looked promising... only it was very full. So, in an attempt to wait out the crowd, we hit up a store that seemed to give the promise of electrical goods.

Indeed, the first floor of the building had phones, tablets, and aisles upon aisles of iPhone cases. Where the real fun came in were the two floors above, namely the toy and vidya games stores (respectively).

We spent somewhere on the order of an hour in this building, entirely unplanned and done in desparation. So we decided to head back to the restaurant... which was even worse than it had been before. The hunger had reduced our appetite for arguing, so we came up with a plan: if we hadn't seen a decent "authentic" place by the time we had gone up to the next major intersection and crossed over, we would hit up a KFC we'd seen. In our journey to that intersection, we glanced down a busy side street. In hopes of increasing the chances of not having KFC, we ventured down... and stumbled across a small underground shop.

The food was pretty fucking fantastic and there was a SHIT TON of it. Having satisfied the hunger and now in a much better mood, we headed to Ueno Park. There's not much to tell, so I'll just leave the pictures.

On the last edge of our walk through the park (and slightly suggested by the final picture), we took ourselves on a ride on pedal powered swan boats (ours was pink). It was really too cramped to down much in the line of pictures or video (though I thought I had got some video), so I'll have describe it IN WORDS. Chris and I were on the pedals and Jeff was steering. Immediately upon leaving the dock, we all started giggling our asses off. In fact, a descent into pure childhood antics was the theme of that boat ride. It was filled with lots of singling and loud "whoooo"ing. We even played trash patrol at one point, circling around to catch a Pepsi bottle that was drifting about. We also were waving at some of the fine Japanese female specimins (except for the ones that were with guys). It was probably the most good, hearty fun I've had in some time. Also, good exercise; pedaling a boat is not an easy task, even we doing it in tandem. What I needed was some Dragon Ball drink to boost my power level.

The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. We took a train home (conveniently, the station was literally right under the park) and chilled for a bit. We then hit up the Asakusa shrine, as has become custom, and hit up Taiko machine. I miraculously didn't even touch a single crane machine. A quick stop at 7-Eleven and the alcohol vending machine downstairs, and we enjoyed an evening of being drunk and loud conversation.

Which brings us to sleep and also today.