Japan Day 3 - Rain!

Day three of our trip to Japan meant rain, rain, rain....it wasn't pouring down but at the same time it was enough to make the day truly miserable. To make matters worse all the art galleries and museum's were closed as Monday had been a public holiday which in Japan means public spaces are generally closed on the following day. But we tried to make the best of the situation by jumping on the subway and heading over to Ueno Park.

However, after a while the rain became a little bit too much we decided to retreat to the markets near Ueno - where I even managed to buy a pair of gumboots. Perfect for such dreary weather.

After further wandering we decided to head to Akihabara, an area which is known in Japan for it's Maid Cafe's and Anime.

We started out with a maid cafe which has to be one of the weirdest experiences of my life, Japanese girls dress up in costumes right out of an anime and serve you food and drinks. It was a little weird as the girls acted just like anime characters and kept on coming over and saying things to us in Japanese and then giggling like crazy (it wasn't just us - it was everyone in the cafe). You had to pay to take photo's of the girls but I did manage to nab a photo of the sandwhich board for the cafe and we were allowed to take photos of our cake.

After some very expensive tea and cake in the maid cafe with the giggling Japanese "maids" we decided to check out some of the sights of Akihabara - including a visit to a store that specialised in selling robots.

We also visited the Tokyo Anime Centre, there were a lot of people waiting there for something exciting to happen. But we got sick of waiting with them to find out what the very exciting thing was - instead we took some photo's of the characters in the centre and decided to leave.

We decided to finish up our day with some Japanese Karaoke which was pretty fun but I have to say the song choosing device was pretty difficult to work out (compared to the song choosing device we usually have in Norebang) so we didn't actually get to sing that many songs.