The Tokyo Marathon and Tokyo's Alice in Wonderland Cafe

So, Tuesday is my birthday and living in the arse crack of Japan doesn't present a whole lot of opportunity for birthday celebration...especially not mid-week so today I met up with six friends and spent the day in Tokyo, a very fun time had by all. It was great!

We went to watch the Tokyo Marathon (unfortunately it was pissing it down with rain...not that I should complain cos any much further East and we would have been likely to have been hit by a tsunami, so rain I can cope with, and cope with well, being British). The main rain issue was that the umbrella's made actually seeing anything of the marathon a rather tactical affair. We wound up ducking and diving all day by Asakusa (a bit touristy area by a large shrine in Tokyo) and it was really fun.. There were people dressed up as all sorts of things just like in the London marathon...we had Japanese characters like Anpanman, Duraimon and Pikachu, plus a Spiderman, people in suits, and even a man dressed as a Swan Lake style ballerina who stopped to give us a five-minute ballet rendition in the middle of the course!! It was also really funny to see so many people stopping mid-race to take photos...how Japanese!! We were right by a stage two which had some traditional Japanese music and dancing...including these poor old women wearing next to nothing in the freezing cold, who were doing the most pain-stakingly boring dance to the most pain-stakingly repetitive song for about 45 minutes....I bet they were just dying for the tsunami to hit Tokyo to put them out of their misery!!

After we had finished watching the marathon (which is very tiring....much worse than running I'm sure) we stopped for cake (as we often do when we have nothing else to do) and then made our way over to the posh part of Tokyo, Ginza, to go a themed Alice in Wonderland Cafe Restaurant!! It had a wicked atmosphere, all the waitresses are dressed as Alice and they have Alice music playing and all the dishes are laid out to look like faces and animals of things that are in the books and the film. It was all very random and very Japanese...but then that's just how I like things really! A great time had by all I think!