tokyo, yay, i am back. so a little sightseeing today in the capital of japan. for easier travelling we bought ourselves a "suica" card which is a rechargeable smart card, valid for metro, JR ring line, and loads of vending machines that have the suica logo on them. first stop was shibuya crossing[04], world's busiest crossing, but actually it was not very busy today. right there is also the statue for little dog hachiko[05], of which there's already a movie too. maybe you have seen it, i have not - there is richard gere involved. it's about the dog in the 1930s, who still came to the station to wait for it's owner even years after he had died. cute, faithful dog. so we paid a visit to "shibuya 109", a multi storeyed store full of fashion shops. and here another surprise: nina is also a fashion victim. we spent several hours in there, and nina enjoyed every minute of it. hehe. for the sake of fairness we then went to the "shibuya 109 men" store, which contains men stuff (but not only, as the name would imply). i was looking for some nice t-shirts but did not really find any that i liked. instead i spotted those cat-donuts in "shibuya 109" - so cute, but i did not buy one, as i was not hungry. but we had ice cream later at a cold stone creamery, where we had already enjoyed ice cream in taiwan last year. after that we visited roppongi hills[17-78], with the spider[18,21-22,78], mori tower[17,20,22-23,26,39], mori garden[25,27,40-43], and the tv asahi building[25,42,44-51]. funny thing is, last time i was here, tv asahi was celebrating their fifth anniversary. five years later, guess what they were celebrating - yeah, ten years. so again there was loads of activity in the spacious atrium. stuff i haven't seen in 2008 was the kitty shop[28-30,32-34] with the cute kitty slowly falling asleep as i was taking pictures. right next to the kitty shop was a dog beauty centre[35-38] for getting your little doggy super pimped. then we entered mori tower to enjoy a good view over tokyo. but a few things have changed. first of all, there's no "sky aquarium" anymore. then there was a harry potter exhibition that reduced the size of the observatory deck where i have taken my favourite picture from my last trip. so the room was too small to enjoy the reflections on the ceiling. too bad. also we were told we could not go on the "sky deck", the uppermost platform where one can walk on the roof, outside. the exact reason no staff could explain to us properly. so we got quite disappointed, and did not really have much fun in visiting the "mori art museum" either (which i omitted on my last visit) with an exhibition on the topic of "love". also "sky view" was pretty crowded (you know, japanese style crowdedness). another fact that did not really amuse us. so far it was really much of a disappointment, when suddenly a security guy could finally explain to us what was going on here. there will be fireworks today, so sky deck is invitation only, and sky view was so crowded[63]. but it will be opened after 20:45 again. so we decided to stay a little longer. ha, finally we were happy again (that was not so hard, wasn't it?). so we enjoyed the sunset[52-54,56-58], later the fireworks[59-62], night over tokyo[64-66], and at last the sky deck[68-77], yippieh. puh, if only japanese people would be better in talking english, or us better in talking japanese, it would have been much easier today. but also less fun, because, ahm, hm... well, let me put it this way: "i am free to do soup stock another helping"[79] - sou desu-ne...