The mostly last thing we did on Thursday was to go to the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest tower in the world at 635m. There are observation decks at 350m and 450m, although the taller one you have to pay more to get to.

First, a random photo of NIk and I heading from our sushi lunch to the Shinjuku train station. There is construction going on all over the city, and the city is many layered. There are 2-4 layers of shops and rail lines under the ground, ground lever, then multiple elevated road and rail ways. A typical commercial building is 8 floors high, and has retail stores on all the levels. Businesses have large signs on each floor to let you know what you’ll find on that floor. That, plus the language barrier, make it difficult to find what you’re looking for – we spend a lot of time trying to pattern match Japanese symbols without knowing what they are!

Here’s the Skytree from below. It’s very tall.

After the tower we had some time to kill on our last day in Tokyo. We were all exhausted and sore from walking all the time, but no one wanted to go home, so we planned to go to the Rainbow bridge which is a bridge across the Tokyo Bay. We’d planned to walk across it, which was said to be really nice, but we got on the brand new train and got front row seats and it was warm and seated and the view was scrolling past us and we unanimously decided to stay there for the entire run of the train.

Bad news for me – on our way home my knee went from no conversation, to yelling at me with little warning. Over the years I’ve learned how to manage it pretty good, but most of my management techniques involve not walking for another 9 days. 😛 Thankfully today we have a morning of packing and cleaning, then an afternoon of taking a 3.5 hour train to Osaka, then finding our place for the next 2 nights and then…drinking?

And with this post I’m fully up to date!