Day 4 - Jan 10

A couple hours after I got up this morning Tom asked if I wanted to join him in a trip to Tokyo Tower.  We headed out around noon, and once we got on the JR we realized we had no idea which stop to get off at.  We ended up riding all the way around to Akihabara and decided we had gone too far, so we hopped on the JR going the opposite direction and kept a lookout for the Tower, which we knew was nearby one of the stations.  After finally spotting it, we got off at the Omamatsuchou (or something like that) station.  The walk to the Tower wasn't very bad at all, and there were a couple nice parks and a big shrine on the way there.  There was about a 30 minute wait to get our tickets (~800 yen) to take the elevator up to the first observation deck.  The view from that was really cool.  After waiting about an hour (still not quite sure why) we got our tickets (600 yen) to go up to the "Special Observatory," which was the highest observation deck.  That view was really really nice.  Even though we were starving, we waited around on that deck for about an hour for the sun to set behind Mt. Fuji so we could get some nice sunset pics and then some pics of the city lights.  I took way too many pictures of the same scenery today (over 400).  Going through them after we got back around 8 PM was not fun at all.

Oh, I forgot to mention that while we were up at the top observation deck there was an earthquake!  At first I couldn't tell when Tom said he felt something, but then when I leaned against the railing I could feel the heavy vibrations coming through the tower.  They weren't very fast, but they definitely did not feel like something normal, plus the tower was swaying ever so slightly.  I don't know if anyone else on the deck noticed it since it was so small, but still, that was pretty intense.

Aside: For those who don't know, Tokyo Tower is 333m tall (the upper observation deck is 250m), and the Eiffel Tower is only 320m.  Pretty cool.