Once we'd sorted out storage of luggage, and found the right exit, we walked over to the Imperial Palace Gardens, and strolled through them for a while. Unfortunately, early winter is not a good time to be visiting gardens. There was still a little autumn foliage, but most of the trees were bare, and many of the other plants (and the grass) were dead or dying down for the winter.
The next bit of fun was figuring out the train/subway lines to get to our hotel. The Tokyo train/subway system is extremely complicated; one look at a logical diagram, and my eyes immediately glaze over as my mind refuses to believe that the diagram is intelligible. However, with a lot of staring at maps, and a little bit of asking for help at an information desk, we figured out the appropriate boarding platform to find a subway train to our hotel, only 2 stops away.
On the topic of hotels, we managed to find a cheap, new and clean-looking hotel. There's always a trade-off. We have a semi-double bed, a very narrow desk, and just enough room to get between them. Tiny, even by Japanese standards.
After a bit of a rest, we got on the subway to Akihabara Electric Town. Akihabara is an amazing mix of electronics stores, both low and high end, anime (Japanese animation) shops, gaming arcades, cheap and nasty looking duty free shops, and a number of adult shops and maid cafes. You can buy electrical wiring in one shop, and a Mac product from a dedicated Mac store just around the corner. We wandered through the streets for a while, and looked into a few stores, but really, there was little of interest. We also got accosted by a girl in a maid outfit encouraging us to visit the maid cafe she worked at, but we didn't follow up on the offer, finding a cheap beef and rice place to eat at instead.
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