Due to a flight delay, we’re still here! In fact our entire itinerary was pushed back 24 hours, but we were lucky to find out early enough that our room remained available for another night (for about $150). So we had an extra day in Tokyo!
We decided to visit the planetarium in Ikebukuro to watch a show called The Fantastic Night A Cat Showed Me The Stars. We were offered English language devices, but opted out since we wanted to just relax to soothing Japanese voice over and images.
And relax is what we did! The above pic was taken before the show proper begins, and you can see they were projecting cats onto the dome for the pre show. The actual presentation seemed to tell a story of a cat describing some unusual constellations (including milk!) and was every bit as ‘peaceful’ and ‘healing’ (as the Japanese say) as we expected. It’s almost certain, in the dark room with projected stars and whispering voices, that I fell asleep multiple times 🙂
Afterwards we went looking for the new Ultraman pachinko machine with no success. It had been a few years since we’d gone into a pachinko parlour and we were surprised to see almost every machine these days is licensed, with loads of various series represented. The machines are elaborate as you can see, but we didn’t play any since they didn’t take cash.
We explored a few more game centers…
Failed to win anything on crane games…
But had a great time with a brand new IC-card Kamen Rider game. I played this one a few times to get more cards and got a double of what I assume is a chase card. I’m sure I’ll play this again in the future.
Dinner was sushi (which will probably be lunch tomorrow as well) and then it was time to retire and end our extra day.
In spite of the delay, and despite the rain (the only poor weather we’ve had this trip) we made the most of this unexpected extra day. This time tomorrow, I’m sure we’ll actually be flying home 🙂