Last full day in Tokyo - Blossoms for the last

Well another fine day in Tokyo. Wonderful sun in the springtime. We decided to go over to the Imperial East Gardens and take a look inside this time. I nice place to get away from it all. Well almost. Unlike Palatine Hill in Rome, you can still hear the Tokyo grind from inside the palace walls. After that we stopped by Mitsukoshi, a department uber-store with multiple locations in Tokyo, to pickup up a bento-box lunch... and then some. (Mitsukoshi's breadth and quality of food offerings boggles my tiny American mind.) We then jumped back onto the subway and headed back to Ueno Park to see the cherry blossoms in full effect. There were a few in bloom when we stopped by in the evening a couple of days ago. Now they are in full bloom. It is ground zero for Sakura watching in Tokyo right now. So we sat, along with tons of other people and had our lunch. We counted our blessings and had the best picnic lunch I could ever conceive of. Of course the two mochi ice cream desserts we each had kinda put our meal over the top, but we figured we'd walk it off. Hey, when in Rome... Then we headed over to Roppongi and the new uber-shopping/building complex, Roppongi Hills. A huge, massive complex. Amazing. But so over the top, it just oozes money. It feels like you need to be so rich to shop and live there, that DNA and bank account statements should be required for entrance. The large number of security personnel does nothing but reinforce this. Like I said, an amazing place, but I don't think we got much out of it. So now we're back, getting ready for our last night in Tokyo. Its been a great trip so far. We'll see how tomorrow goes with stashing the luggage at Tokyo Station until we get onto the bullet train for Kyoto. Every day is a day of firsts here. By the end of our stay here I think we've travelled on the Ginza, Marunuchi, Hibiya, Oedo, Hanzomon and Asakusa subway lines, plus the JR Line out of Shinjuku. Not bad for a couple of days.

Japan - Day 5