Another gorgeous and hot day in Tokyo today! We grabbed a family mart breakfast and headed to Ueno Zoo to find some Giant Pandas! It was only two stops on the metro, I'm slowly getting used to the metro, you have to select the fair amount depending on what station you are getting off at, however the station nearest to us doesn't have the English version so I've had to memorise the metro map a little and if we get stuck try to communicate with the non English speaking ticket officer.
We walked through a huge park which was next to the Ueno station, it was really peaceful considering we were in a busy city! It's kind of crazy they have a zoo in the centre of the city! The cheapest zoo we have ever been to at £3 each for entry... There were a lot of people at the zoo but it wasn't as jam packed that you couldn't move which is what I thought it was going to be like!
We spotted the pandas first and there was a huge queue to see them so we decided to see them first. The queue went down really fast which was good. The zoo has at least two of every animal because they try to have the animals reproduce because all the species here are on the endangered scale.
The pandas were so cute! The both of them were just say minding their own business, munching on bamboo sticks, they were peeling the bark off the sticks and eating them. They only digest 20-30% of what they eat in bamboo sticks per day. They literally have to sit and eat all day in order to survive because they don't get any nutrition from the sticks! They do eat rodents and some fruits I think to try and get some nutrition but not a lot. We could have sat there all day and watched them eating, they were incredible! Now we need to go to china and feed the baby pandas in the conservation breeding site they have there! Adorable little things!! There are only about 1500 giant pandas left wild in the world!

There were loads of animals, elephants, polar bears, seals, gorillas, lions, loads of different species of monkeys! Hippopotamus's, crocodiles and rhinos. They even had an anteater!!

After the zoo we went to the Amayoko walking street, it's full of street stalls selling food and fresh veg, knock off goods and home goods. It's a really famous street in Ueno, I wasn't overly impressed with that one. The other streets around this one was better with their little restaurants and street eating, sat on crates and tables made out of plastic crates and ply wood. We found a cafe that had an English menu thank god! We went in only to find that you had to order from a ticket machine. You put your money in and you pressed the button of which food dish you wanted and you get a ticket to give to the waitress, I needed a little help so I just pointed at the photo and she told me which button I had to press. It's mind of cool but a little difficult for the likes of us!
Food was delicious, it was like yesterday's lunch but I gave Scott my pork again!

We got back to the room around 4pm, our legs and feet were killing us from all the walking. We haven't done this much walking since Singapore! Feeling the burn to say the least!


Tonight we went out to see the Tokyo Tower lot up, it's kind of like the Eiffel Tower but it's red and white and at night the lights make it look orange. We went up to the observation deck, Tokyo looked cool at night! We could see the rainbow bridge and the fireworks display at Disneyland.
Every high rise building has red flashing lights at the top of them for the aeroplanes. As you can imagine Tokyo is enormous and there are masses amount of high rise buildings so as far as the eye could see there were red flashing lights! They were everywhere! The few streets we could see that had the big billboards and advertising signs lot up on the sides of buildings made the place look really pretty! The photos don't give it justice, we tried to get the best photos possible but we will see how good they really come out!

On the way back we stopped at Ueno again and had some food, we found another noodle bar which had an English menu, it was limited but we had to take what we could get that was written in English! The guy helped us pick out which buttons to press on the ticket machine and we ordered a beer each! We went photo crazy because we were the only ones in the place so we took advantage of being tourists! Haha. The beer was really good, it was sort of soft and light drinking it! yummy! :)

It was 10.30pm by the time we started making our way back home, there are big games buildings full of slot machines and weird crazy games that people sit at and pour their change into and they are so bloody loud! It's literally like being in a club full of music only it's really cheesy comic music and air con blasting and the noise of people tapping on the games. All of these people seem to be business men, all still in their works clothes. They were pouring out of the games stations at about 10.30pm! Dirty stop outs!