Exploring Tokyo

After the fish market, we decided to head to the imperial palace. This is the historical castle that's still used as a residence for the current emperor of Japan. I was excited to see the first of many castles that I've read about in Shogun and other books. I can see Ann rolling her eyes at me now, just as if I was still in Japan drooling over the historic sites.


Imperial Palace with school group taking a class picture
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Palace entrance with occupied guard posts
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After the imperial palace, we took a trip to a craft store that Alicia likes to frequent. They give you cardboard trays of different shapes and sizes, and you pick out paper to glue on them, finally lacquering the piece to make it repel moisture and have a sheen to it. I was skeptical at first, until I found the samurai decorative paper. Then I was into it. I think these stores would go over big in the US. Put them next to Archivers for competition. Ann really liked this, and thought it was a relaxing thing to do.


Ann and Alicia at Japanese craft shop
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After the craft shop, we headed to Asakusa shrine. This is a large shrine in the middle of Tokyo. There were tons of school kids hanging out here eating the wide variety of sweets available. It was crowded, but fun to people watch.


Asaksusa Shrine Crowd
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We tried our first Japanese treat which are freshly backed small cakes baked in iron moulds that have a sweat red bean paste inside. They were really good, the red beans kind of tasted like sweet potatoes.

This was our first major shrine, so it was very impressive. Like every shrine in Japan, there's a purification fountain to cleanse your hands (and/or mouth) before entering the shrine. There are also guardians at the shrines to make sure no riff-raff enter. They have chicken wire protecting the statues from pigeons, but you can make out this guy's abs, which say to me "stay out, or feel the wrath of my 60-second abs".


60-second abs guy
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Looking back, this shrine looks a lot like other shrines we've visited, but this being our first shrine, we were really impressed. The roof itself is very large, and definitely tells you that you're in Japan.


Asaksusa Shrine
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This shrine is home to what they call "The Little Buddha", as opposed to the "Big Buddha" that we encountered later in the trip. Here's Ann and I in front of the Little Buddha. Notice the serene expressions on all 3 of our faces (2 of which are due to recovering from the effects of jet-lag, the other the result of achieving supreme enlightenment).


Little Buddha
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Man, this was a full first day. We ended the day with a trip to Omante-Sando, which has lots of shopping, a 100 yen store, and Harajuku which is kind of like Uptown for the Minneapolis area, only more kids. They have the outrageous outfits and hair styles, good people watching here.


Omote-Sando Area
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Harajuku
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I don't have any pictures after that for the first day. I think that's when we collapsed from exhaustion. Alicia gave us a great first day tour to help us get oriented to Tokyo.

Still to come, biking through Tokyo (or pedestrian dodging through Tokyo)...