Tokyo - Day 5

Our 5th day in Tokyo was the only day it rained during our entire trip. What a blessing! Tokyo is about as rainy as Seattle so it is pretty much a miracle that it rained only once. It worked out perfectly because there were quite a few things we wanted to do indoors so we crammed them all into one day. 

We started the day at the 100 yen store. It's like a very glorified, huge $1 store but not nearly as trashy as the stores in the U.S. We spent a long time in the store and the kids loaded up on lots of fun trinkets and treats. I loved seeing all the different things you could buy there. They had awesome office supplies and travel items and we bought quite a bit. 

 There were definitely some interesting snacks. This is freeze dried shrimp:

 Freeze dried sardines:

 Dried seaweed with tempura:

We headed over to get conveyor belt sushi for lunch. Unfortunately a bunch of my pictures from lunch got deleted so this is all I have. We LOVED the sushi in Japan. And we tried some pretty crazy stuff and liked just about everything we tried! Our kids are great and adventurous eaters and they ate a ton of the sushi too. The little girls loved Udon noodle soup with tempura shrimp. The menu is all on computer screens and once you pick the pieces you want, they travel to you on a conveyor belt (missing pictures - boo). It was so much fun! The kids couldn't get enough of watching the belt deliver our food.

 You are charged by the plate and these are all our plates we ate. About 80 plates with 2 pieces each for our two families. It was seriously yummy!

After lunch we headed over to a karaoke place. Karaoke is huge in Japan and there are lots of places where you can go and rent out room for a few hours and sing to your hearts content. It was a blast! The place had unlimited drinks, we brought snacks and they had thousands of songs to choose from. The kids had so much fun singing so many of the popular songs (and a few of the same ones over and over again). It was loud but such a fun time.

After karaoke we went to the Japanese bathhouse - called Onsen. This is one thing we really wanted to do in Japan and it was a fabulous experience. The bathhouse is split by gender and each side has tons of different baths to get into. The waters are different temperatures and different scents, some indoors and some outside. You cleanse yourself really well before you get in. I don't know how to explain it well but it was amazing and just incredibly relaxing. We spent a few hours enjoying the baths (the guys had taken the littlest kids on their side so it was especially relaxing for the moms). It is probably my favorite experience of the entire trip and so memorable. My kids have talked about it non stop since we got back.

After the baths we headed back for a late night dinner (we ate at about midnight) prepared by the guys. Another great and full day.

An added note. Addison's teacher sent us an email about 2 weeks after we got back from the trip and said that Addison had written a story in class about our trip to Japan. She scanned it and sent it over to us. She had written about our time at the onsen and included several anatomically correct pictures (you onsen with nothing on). She said it is her favorite story she's had a student write in her 20 year teaching career. Super hilarious and we all about died laughing. It's a keeper for sure!