I got up just a little before Frances and Clive around 6.35 and we all had our breakfast packed up, tidied the apartment a bit and headed off. The train was very regular for the morning commute and lots of people got off so we had space for the 2 stops to the main station where we got our booked bullet train with 3 seats together. The train had electric plugs to charge from but no WiFi and mine kept playing up every now and then by connecting to WiFi I couldn't access and crashing my settings. I eventually managed to forget the networks but didn't find WiFi so I read and did some other things but couldn't look up Tokyo as I'd forgotten to save any webpages. I thought about North Korea and possible travel routes which I'd done a bit of research for by now but not enough and Tokyo was my only chance at the Chinese visa. We all ate on the train and I had banana sandwiches, noodles and gyoza dumplings. We arrived at 1.10 and the station was pretty big so it was hard to work out the right way and we went wrong. We went back and found a JR ticket place and booked a train for the next day to Matsumoto, our last use of our JR passes. After that we went to the train and took it a couple of stops then walked 15 minutes to our hostel, Sakura which is the same name we'd had in Osaka. It seemed ok and had breakfast and we left our things in the room and around 2.30 headed out to see the imperial palace. We went to Yasukuna shrine and had a look around. It had a few buildings and was next to a small arena where they have sumo fights sometimes. They also had a museum where you can see the entrance hall for free which had a plane, some guns and a train that had been on the Thai Burna railway. We moved on and went through the gate to the castle but there was no access as it was closed on Mondays so we ended up walking all the way around and I got whistled at for stepping over a very small chain fence to take a photo. We carried on south to a park which we walked around before Clive and Frances wanted a coffee shop but instead we ended at the train station and they got some things from a 7-11. We took the train north to Uneo and changed to the subway for 2 stops to see Senso-ji temple. There were a few tourist shopping streets and the temple had a few buildings although the pagoda was partly scaffolded. Clive checked his fortune and he and Frances wanted to rest a bit and then go for dinner. I walked west towards Uneo park and got some food at a great supermarket called Aeon. It was a bit late when I got to the park and the 2 temples I saw were both shut although one looked quite good. I walked on past the lake and around the zoo but it was dark and I couldn't see any animals. The route was not great and I went a bit around on the roads before I came back to the park where there was a few small things like statues and museums which were closed. It was later than I'd planned and I wanted to sort out the Chinese visa so I took the train and connected to the local rather than the rapid train and got a bit closer to the hostel. I used the computer downstairs to look up flights, destinations and I tried to convert my passport to a pdf so I could print it. I went to a family mart and used their photocopier which can print pdfs from a usb or phone if you have the right app and data and it worked well. Clive came down and let me use his notepad to convert files to pdfs but eventually I gave up with a better idea of what to do, but nothing really concrete as I wanted to sleep on the decisions and we went to sleep around 11.30.
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