Soooo I might have fallen behind on my blogs a little bit… oops. I would rather wait and put out a good blog making sure that I cover everything rather than skipping things to get them out on time, but I promise that I’ll still be covering every day until I leave! I’ve done sooo much since my last post and I’m so excited to share everything!!

To start the day, I woke up early and explored Akihabara with Fabian to see if we could find any more merchandise that we could snatch up as we were preparing to pack all our things again. I personally was looking to find some Pokemon cards as they’re basically sold out of everything in stores, and I stumbled across a card shop that had what I considered to be a LOT of good deals. I only bought some single cards because I didn’t want to chance my luck with the packs, and I’m really happy with the few that I got! We also went to a figure store called Tamashii Nations so Fabian could look at their Gunpla (a term for model kits… i think?) and he got a cool exclusive Iron Man figure.

We met up with the rest of the class at noon to head to Diver City, a place well known for its giant mall and giant Unicorn Gundam statue. While I don’t know much about the anime or the model kit community surrounding Gundam, the giant statue was really awesome and we even got to see it change forms (it basically just played some lights and music for 30 seconds and it’s horns closed together to become a single horn, like a unicorn). I don’t think I picked up anything from this mall, but there was a Mister Donut that I was finally able to try and MAN are those donuts good!!

Once we were finished at Diver City around 3, we went to the Miraikan Museum (“Mirai” means future) which had a lot of cool interactive exhibits that ended up being super depressing and existential. The entire thing was basically just “humanity is ruining Earth, we should fix it” and while I enjoyed seeing a lot of the exhibits they had it was kind of a mood killer. They did have this giant spherical Earth display that you could walk around that was really cool though!

The last group thing we did that day was by far my favorite. We finally got to visit TeamLab Planets, which has become really iconic online for its fantastic photoshoot potential. It’s basically an “interactive” art exhibition where you’re walking into these giant artsy scenes that make for some really good photos. I did already make my Instagram post about this because I just couldn’t wait, but I’ll put my photos here too because I’m really proud of them. The experience was really awesome and I think it’s especially fun as a couple or a group going through it together.

Once the school-sanctioned portion was over, Liam, Megan, Skyler, Fabian, Cameron and I decided to rent a karaoke room together for a couple hours because we felt like it was a quintessential Japan experience that we needed to have. Because I’m not one for singing with others (and a couple of the people I was with were MILES better than me) I didn’t sing much, but it was fun to look at all of the songs they had, both English and Japanese, and see how different the experience was compared to karaoke in America. We were in our own private room with couches, a massive screen, and two mics, and overall we had a great time! This was also, however, when the rain began.

Something interesting about our time in Tokyo is that there was actually a typhoon (Typhoon Mawar – though I’m pretty sure it was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached us) dancing along the coast of Tokyo over the last couple days, writing this in retrospect. From Thursday night until Saturday morning, a majority of the country (including where we were staying) faced a LOT of rain and wind. While it was never too bad for us rain-wise, the wind definitely broke a good chunk of our umbrellas and left me wishing I had brought a rain coat instead. We didn’t see any damage or severe flooding though, so I don’t think it was that bad!

Tomorrow is the last school-planned day of our trip! Which makes me really sad, because everyone leaves on Saturday 🙁 but I’m happy that I have a few extra days to get some final bucket list items out of the way!