Day 16 in Tokyo

Despite a rather late start we made up for it by a busy afternoon in the Ginza area. We started at the Sony showroom - checked out their new 3D TVs - better than 3D movies In my opinion as the background stays in focus

Went on and had lunch in a coffee shop in the round building at the Ginza Yonchrome intersection.

Continued on to the Apple store and spent some time checking out the new range of Macbooks











From there it was on to the Hahuhinkan toy store - lots of crazy stuff, naturally we spent some money here.

A little furher on to the Panasonic Living Showroom - interesting displays of all sorts of energy and water efficient home appliances.

They are really promoting new cooktops that use special cookwear and heat by (I think) magnetic induction. The hostess pointed out that they were trying to move away from gas cooking so as to cut down on possible earthquke damage. These cooktops only produce heat when the cookwear is in place. They are apparently very energy efficient.

This showroom also had an interesting display on their new water saving, self cleaning toilet. The display reported on the challenges faced in testing this appliance - they put a lot of effort into developing artificial poo to enable them to test the toilet - apparently The testing was the equivalent of 100 years of use and it still ended up shiny and clean! The second photo below shows the cleaning apparatus at the side. The toilet lid opens as you approach.
















We returned back to Nishi Shinjuku and had a nice Italian meal.



















We found lots of Japanese restaurants in our area but our lack of ability to read Japanese is a real disadvantage as very few places have English menus. Although many menus have accompanying photos it's still often not clear what the photo depicts. I will definately have to improve on this before our next trip over.

-- Post From Geoff's iPhone