More on Japan...

While wandering through Tokyo we took the time to visit Mount Fuji, tour the cherry blossoms at the various parks and toured through several different districts all of which are unique in their own way. At night, the more populous areas are lit up with all sorts of neon signs trying to get you into whatever store, restaurant, or bar that may be located in each building.

It really was a little overwhelming, but a lot of this may have been because we couldn't read any of the signs. Every building would have at least five floors of different shops, the only ones we visited had picture menus or a listing of the drink specials in English.

On our second night in Tokyo, the first game was on night 3, we went over to the Shinjuku area, supposedly a popular dining and drinking nightspot. We had an incredible sushi dinner and then found a small little bar called Mother's in the basement of one of the buildings.
We walked down into this bar and there was only one other customer in there, actually it seemed like he knew the bartender. We figured we would stay for one drink, but when they gave us the menu the front was the beer and drink list and the second part was a list of every artist they had CDs for in the restaurant. We were able to pick a CD and then the song and the bartender acted like our own private DJ. Two song selections later and we were the only people left in the bar, the bartender loved us and also selected out some good Japanese metal, and other bands for us to listen to. We had a great time and ended up walking out of there after just over four hours.....
The next night we had baseball, we already told you about our excellent sushi restaurant, so now we will tell a little more about the game experience. Above is a photo of me with a ticket I found on the ground, this was a lower section ticket with a face value of over $100. We turned it into the information desk, we can only hope that whomever lost it was able to recover it.

Earlier in the day while touring through the electronics areas we realized that the camera prices were almost as low as the deal that we got in Hong Kong, sensing that we could save ourselves a flight to HK we purchased a new telephoto lens (140-600mm) which really made for some great baseball photos, that's me with the new lens above. We also bought Tina a new camera so that we wouldn't have to continue fighting over who will be taking the pictures with the high-end camera. We bartered hard with this guy and think that we managed to get a good deal, but in the end we couldn't get him to throw in a $5 mini tripod for free...
Pre-game all of the fans in the outfield will lower items to be signed by the players, the whole outfield wall looks like this.
Despite the excitement of the game, we noticed that a lot of the businessmen that game to the game were dozing off. I guess that the Western crowd just isn't as loud as the standard Japanese baseball crowd.
I don't even know what to say about these A's fans, each of them were in a different animal costume. This was game two, and it was their belief that wearing the outfits had helped the A's to win.