Japan Day 22 (ni jū ni)

&mpSunshine City Mall, Aquarium, ; Zoo

Today we took the subway all the way out to Ikebukuro to go to the Sunshine City mall. It's a big shopping area. Lot's of department stores and smaller shop's along the main drag.



Movies look good...


Once we made it to the mall, Ultraman was waiting outside for us. Turns out this is an anniversary of Ultraman, so all the toy stores have tons of Ultraman figures. It seems like they changed his outfit every year because there are at least 20 of them.


Like many places in Tokyo, the mall is at the bottom of several skyscrapers. At the top of one of them is an aquarium/zoo.
Unfortunately it was dark inside so most of my fish photos came out blurry. I've put up some of the better ones.



This one had archer fish in it, which shoot a stream of water out of their mouth to knock bugs into the water where they can eat them.



My mom should remember this little guy from when we had a salt-water tank...

Turns out they also had a Spawn of Cthulhu



Outside on the roof they had a sea lion show, as well as a monkey cage, a penguin enclosure, and some walk through exhibits.


The walkthrough was populated with what I think are capybaras. They were free to wander around inside, mingling with the tourists.


And for some reason they had a lemur in a cage...


At the end of the walkthrough they had a couple of these cute little foxes:


..and also an armadillo butt...


Next to that was the penguin pool



They also had some neat pelicans. Those birds were big!



In a big tank by themselves, they had a couple of sunfish. They weren't as big as the one I saw at the Monterey Aquarium, but they were still good sized.


Debbie poses with the aquarium mascot:


After the aqaurium we went back down into the mall and over to another skyscraper to go up to its observatory level. This one even let us get on the roof, but it closed at sunset, which was about 5 minutes after we got up there.



That's Shinjuku in the distance. Tokyu Hands is near the bottom of that Chrysler Building look-alike.


After the observatory we went back down into the mall to find a restaurant where we had a good chance of being able to communicate with the staff. We wound up at a nice Chinese restaurant. The next two pictures show two places that we didn't stop at. I wonder what they serve?



After dinner we headed back out into the night, headed for the train station (with a stop at BIC camera).