Wednesday, 24th of December

Chucky: We spent the morning at Emi's place hanging out with the family and packing up our bags. Chrissy had a sleep because she still has a cold and I found things in our luggage to throw out. Eventually we got both the bags packed and both were lighter than 20kgs (just!). We said goodbye to everybody and Emi and her Mum took us to the station where we waited around for the Kodama shinkansen to take us to Tokyo. The shinkansen trip was comfortable and we got an AMAZING view of Fuji san. AMAZING. Just like a postcard. Fuji-san is really big.
Chrissy: When we arrived at Tokyo station we had to catch another train to Ueno, so we joined in with the crowd and rushed through the station and onto a train. The walk to our hotel was fairly short but extremely crowded. Yay! Back in crowded Tokyo!
After we got settled we went out to find some dinner. We went to some upstairs place which looked a bit seedy at first but turned out to be DELICIOUS food. We had a bacon Okonomiyaki and some yaki-soba. Despite telling the waiter that I don't eat prawns, I found some tiny tiny tiny prawn-type animals in the yaki-soba. After eating a bunch of it. I had thought that they were little slices of pickled ginger, because they're exactly the same colour. I had to look really closely, but they were definately miniature prawns. I stopped eating and began to worry about it. I did start to feel sick, but it's all better now and the worry was probably causing the nausea after all. Maybe I'm NOT allergic to prawns? They were only very tiny, so maybe I am? Charles tells me that tomorrow we're having a whole lobster for lunch.
We walked around the area for a while, which looked fairly seedy with lots of bouncers with earpieces walking around being tough. I don't know who they were bouncing. We went to Don Quiote which is a huge chain that sells everything. Literally everything. Headphones, chewing gum, ballgowns, tinsel. It even had imported Tim Tams and Pringles!
We went to a Lawon's and a 7/11 and a Family Mart and bought some Christmas Cake and a miniature bottle of champagne for a Christmas celebration. HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Satuday 6th of December

Chrissy: Today we went to a new Italian Restaurant that opened around the corner. We ate a ridiculous amount of awesome Japanese-Italian food. The carbonara was prepared IN AN ACTUAL CHEESE. I learnt that Japanese "ginger ale" is a pale imitation of the sneeze-inducing Australian kind.

This evening we went with Emi's brothers' family to N- to see the Christmas Illumination. It was amazingly cold! We took these little heat packs that have chemicals which react to oxygen to make them hot. We got there around 4:30, and had an early dinner in a Chinese restaurant (not that great), and when we were finished, all the illuminations were... illuminated. The most spectacular was the tunnel which was about 200metres long, completely made out of little gold lights. Then there was a huge field of blue and red lights, with big shining mechanical butterflies flapping slowly.

We had a foot bath at an interesting little onsen place. The water was extremely hot, so it warmed us up quickly. It was interesting and fun! On the way out we looked at the coloured leaves of some trees that were lit up by some hidden lights. They were really beautiful!

This was taken before the lights came on...

And after!
This is us at the entrance to the light tunnel!


Links about the Nabana no Sato Winter Illumination: Gizmodo, FarEastGizmo
It has 4.5 million LEDs!