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Day 8 highlights:

• After coming back from the early run to the fish market, everyone took naps to gear up for the full day ahead. Jenna and Evert hooked us up with Miko who used to work at adidas in Tokyo. We’d never met her except for a few quick emails and she took an entire day to show us around other parts of the city we haven’t been to. She was so fun to hang out with, and it was really generous of her to spend a day with people she didn’t know.

• We started by going to Asakusa to check out an old temple. Inside there was a tube full of sticks with numbers, and you pull out a number and go to a drawer. In the drawer is your fortune. Our group spanned the whole range from bad to best, and Miko showed us how you’re supposed to tie your bad fortune to a stand in the temple and leave it behind. Since Asakusa is known for tempura, we went to a really good tempura restaurant before jumping back on the train for Ginza.
• Ginza is an upscale shopping area that we roamed around for a while and then worked our way to a monorail to get to Odaiba, which is a man-made island in Tokyo Bay and what Miko described as modern Japan (after we went to see Old Japan in Asakusa.) We jumped into a huge shopping mall and got some needed coffee, and we also checked out Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow bridge. There’s a mini Statue of Liberty there that was given to them by France.

• I discovered orange Fanta with mushy stuff in it, kinda like Jello. You shake it a bunch of times and open it, and then it’s fizzy with gooey mucous-like stuff – but really good.
• After walking for hours, we wrapped up by going to a really nice supermarket to look for coffee Jello and load up on Japanese candy.
• A quick change at the hotel and we were back in Shibuya to meet Yukari for dinner at a make your own pancake place. This was another restaurant where your table is a grill, and we got a mix of ingredients to cook up.
• After dinner we met up again with Dave and Tiff and roamed around in the rain to find a bar. We jumped into one that looked good and Tara started pounding Sake.
• When everyone was fried from the long day and the batch of drinks, we jumped in a cab back to the hotel since it was late and we weren’t sure if the trains were still running. The cab driver made like he knew what we were saying, but got totally lost. Once the meter hit $30, we handed him $5 and got out to find another cab. This time around, Ramon called the hotel and put them on with the driver for most of the ride and we made it back in with no problems. Cabs are great in Tokyo – the drivers wear suits and they have automatically opening doors for you when you get in. They all have GPS too, which is a mystery how the first driver got lost since we gave him the address of the hotel and then just started telling him to go to one of the biggest train stations in Tokyo.