The day was a pleasantly cool and breezy one compared to some of the rather stuffy days we'd had. The first place we went to was Asakusa. We went up there to see the Sensoji Temple and the Kaminarimon, a well-known gate with a massive red lantern. It's another well-known sight and popular tourist spot for Japanese as well as gaijin. It was the first temple we'd stopped at that had the fortunes as well as the coin-donation area. After throwing a coin, one uses a method to find a drawer against a wall to open. You take the fortune from the drawer; if it's bad the tradition is to tie to a rope or something there at the temple and leave it in hopes of not having it come true. I think the method used to determine which drawer to open is something akin to throwing dice, but I don't remember
We ate at a somewhat Western restaurant close to the shrine after another circular walk to find a place to eat. I ended up with the old standby of sphaghetti and meatballs, but MAN was it good! This was the first time I'd come across one of those non-Western "squat" toilets. (not that I had to .. you know, thankfully. I'm sure you were all desperate to know that bit of info!)
Since Akihabara was on the way back to the hotel, we decided to stop in there. Wow, I could spend a lot of time looking through those stores. Many of them took up very little space on an individual floor, but were often 8 stories high with very tiny elevators. In addition to the electroncis shopping, there is a "Gamers" store there with lots of anime and goodies of that sort and we made sure to visit that one. We ate supper in Akihabara that night. My friends tried to explain they wanted plum wine. I seem to recall the waitress eventually did bring out the bottle of the stuff they wanted. (umeshuu)