In the lobby of a hotel next door, we quickly checked Internet and a Japanese woman in her twenties decked out in lots of bright colors asked to take a photo on her phone of Sofia. This has also become a common theme - exclamations of "kawai!" and Sofia smiling and pretending to be bashful.
Somehow it was time for Sofia's nap already so we returned to the hotel and she slept for awhile. At 2 pm we had a meeting in our hotel lobby with a Tokyo Volunteer Guide named Ichiro Hayashi.
There are volunteer guide organizations all over Japan, and it is an amazing service. You're expected to pay transportation costs and meal costs for your guide, but that's about it. Ichiro was a retired machinist who worked for many years at Toshiba, and in his retirement he helps his wife take care of their two grandchildren (3 and 9 months) and occasionally goes out on spear fishing outings. I had decided I wanted him to take us to Asakusa and Akihabara, a Buddhist temple and electronics district, respectively. He was terrific - immediately we fed our subway passes in the wrong part of the machine, got them all tangled up, and he helped us straighten that out with the conductor. We rode the subway for quite a long time to the northern part of Tokyo and got out into a packed, chaotic atmosphere surrounding this temple.
A long road leading to the temple is lined with vendors selling trinkets and food, and from time to time we'd stop to try different foods, Ichiro explaining carefully to us what we were seeing-- how the fish market union had sponsored a particular sign leading into the temple, what a particular symbol or trinket meant in Japanese cosmology, etc. We had some unrefined sake, which reminded me of apple cider, hot, sweet and not particularly alcoholic. 
We had some kind of chewy rice sweet that was hot, coated in something like ground up sesame, and reminded me of taffy. And we tried these little crackers that tasted like peanut brittle, Ichiro buying several bags that he gave to us later.Sofia had a cold, so she was a little unhappy with the cold weather and her nose was running a lot.
She cried to return to the ablution fountain, so Nour took her there while Ichiro and I went into the inner part of the temple. It reminded me of a lot of Buddhist temples in China, outside a screened-in inner sanctum, tourists were throwing coins into something, and in the inner sanctum people sat praying quietly to the goddess Kannon. The whole temple was dedicated to her over a thousand years ago by fishermen who found a gold image of her in their nets; however, we were looking at a post World War II replica, since the Americans apparently bombed the original. Another theme that kept coming up in our Tokyo visit - how new everything was, since the original version had been bombed in World War II.Behind the temple was a show with a trained monkey who did back flips and bowed, which fascinated Sofia, and then we tried a few more foods (some sort of gooey balls involving octopus, and french fries made out of potato starch dough, which were surprisingly good). Then we left on the subway for Akihabara, the electronics district.
This was mostly just a big boulevard of brightly lit stores selling electronics, with girls outside wearing short skirts, handing out flyers, and inviting people to various places, including the "maid cafes" which are also a big thing in Tokyo. At a maid cafe you can drink your tea while a girl dressed in a French maid costume (not necessarily revealing) calls you "master." We didn't actually make it inside one of those but did go to a shopping emporium staffed entirely by women in maid costumes.
Ichiro had done research and found a place for us to eat dinner that was in a modern shopping plaza decked out in tasteful Christmas lights (Christmas decor, music, and lights are absolutely everywhere) filled with trendy little restaurants - it served some kind of seafood omelet that they cook on the hibachi grill in the middle of your table, as well as a soy-based rice and noodle dish with some other type of seafood, both specialities of Osaka that have become popular in recent years in Tokyo. I'm amazed that in Tokyo, almost every neighborhood is not only clean but also filled with expensive eateries that are consistently packed. The cheapest you can seem to get is a bowl of noodles for about $4-$5.
I'm also impressed by how stylish Tokyo residents are. I read on some website that Japanese people don't wear black because it's a funeral color - wrong! Everyone is wearing black. The businessmen are all in dark, slim-cut suits, and the women are extremely stylish - dark tights, high heels, sleek skirts, black coats with fur colors, perfectly done nails, colorful cell phones with little hanging charms, designer handbags, and well-coiffed hair. Bangs are in in a big way. There are also plenty of cool, non-business attire-wearing teenagers and people in their twenties, guys in deliberately ripped jeans and pointy-toed boots (the girls wear the suede boots with little hanging pompons). Most of the men have razor cuts and seem to use a lot of hair products, regardless of their attire.
Ichiro was very friendly and told us a lot about his life; it was so amazing to be able to have someone take us around without any confusion, because Tokyo is a confusing place. We had a great time with him and gave him a Rollins sweatshirt when we parted in the train station a little after 7:30 that night.
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