for today we decided to go the source of all the excellent food we had so far, namely tsukiji fish market[01-25]. the last time i have been there, i saw creatures of the sea which i had never seen before. so nina was kind of excited to get there, as i had told her about my last visit here. and while our guidebook recommends to go there very early, we could not get up early today, like all the other mornings for the last week. the hot humid weather, the long walks, all the new stuff made us weary to death over time. and although we really want to see, do and experience as much as possible, it got harder and harder each day to get up early. so, in our case, "early" for this day meant something like 10:30 o'clock. but for the fish/crustacean/food industry this meant almost end of business for the day. in other words: we got there too late for the cool and weird stuff. too sad, too late. nina was really frustrated and sad. but still, we could lay our eyes on some crabs, octopus, huge clams, squid, prawns, fish, and severed body parts. all nice, but not very exotic. on the area of the fish market are some small restaurants that sell fresh sushi. but to get your food there, one had to practice the art of queueing[24-25] again. we did not want to do so (and besides that it would have been too early for my stomach to have fish anyway), so we went on to walk around the imperial palace[29-40]. no, just around, not inside the palace, because - guess what - it is closed on mondays and fridays. additionally it started to rain again in the meantime. not a good day so far, and nina got even more frustrated and sad. hm, we should have checked the opening hours prior to going there. but we will come back here tomorrow. then we drove to shibuya crossing again, as nina saw some lovely shoes at a shop in "shibuya 109" the days before, and has now decided to buy them, since they are unique, and stylish, and... i honestly had no idea what she was talking about, but it seemed like they were really something very special. so why not buy them, right? and besides, it makes nina happy. which makes me happy. then we found a new spot to watch and study the shibuya crossing crowd movements. an overpass nearby. it was interesting watching the change from dry to rainy weather and how people use underground passages to cross the street then instead. so from the usual mass[46] to almost no people[49] at all in about seven minutes. quite impressive. as it did not stop to rain, and shibuya crossing had mutated to an ordinary crossing, we decided to go back to our hotel again. at the hotel i checked my credit card balance online, as ATMs still refused to give us money. and it seemed we made some miscalculations and wrong estimations of how much cash in total we would have left. so to make sure, at first we put aside the money we would need for transportation to the airport. then we put aside the money we would need to pay the hotel. uh damn, we were missing around 3.000 yen (appr. 25 euro) to pay the rent. so we returned our suica cards, and got the deposit of 500 yen for our two cards each back. so 2.000 yen to go, and no cash anymore. desperately, i gave it a last try at an ATM using my credit card with smaller amounts to withdraw, hoping i would get at least some cash. and starting from 50.000 yen descending in steps of 10.000 i got some money at trying 10.000 yen - yippieh, we got cash for food and stuff. so 8.000 yen that we can spend on last day. not much, but better than nothing, right? lucky us. nice. with all the excitement and horror of almost not being able to pay the rent, we thought it is the perfect time to enjoy the private onsen for the last time. and yes, it helped to calm down and relax a bit. oh, we will definitely miss that onsen.