From Iowa to Okinawa: Tokyo Day 3

Sorry for the delay in blogging. I'll be playing catch up with a few posts shortly.

So, we are on the last day of our Thanksgiving trip to Tokyo. If you've seen the Tokyo subway map, it looks completely crazy and absolutely impossible to navigate. Thank God for iPhones and Transit Apps. We were able to type in where we wanted to go, and it would tell us which trains to take in order to get there...amazing! Tokyo overall was an easy to navigate city. Most signs were in English, and if not, then there usually were pictures. See an example below. This marking on the sidewalk shows you were to wait before crossing the street. The thing that intrigued Reagan and I are the way that the shoe marks are painted.

See below - how do you stand like that?

This picture below is of an elevator. I know, not that exciting, except for the number of people packed in it. Elevators were somewhat scarce, and having a stroller, we often times walked what felt like miles out of the way to find the lone elevator in the subway. I guess because there are so few, that Japanese people just pile in to get where they are going. We don't operate that way....we like personal space. The stroller actually bought us space sometimes, but it was comically funny to us how many people would cram in behind us. We didn't travel the subway during the rush hours (on purpose), but I had read about subway attendants that would stand outside the trains and keep shoving people in until the doors closed.

Our first stop of the day was the Sensoji Temple

In order to get to the temple, you had to walk the gauntlet of vendors. It was crowded and not that easy to do with the stroller.

I'm not 100% on what the papers are below, but I think they are people's fortunes for the next year. People were buying them from a booth, then tying them to the fence. This was all written in Japanese, so we skipped this.

There was a big incense pot, and the smell was strong. I don't know if it's the Catholic in me, but I really dislike the smell of incense.

This area was a washing spot for people to wash their hands before going up to the temple. We were standing by a Japanese lady and I struck up a conversation with her. It turns out she was there with the Tokyo Olympic 2020 Candidate City committee and they were holding an event shortly with Japanese Olympians present. She even gave us 4 Tokyo Olympic Candidate City pins, which was very cool.

A few other shots

Another view of the incense pot.

After leaving Sensoji, we decided to have lunch at this Ramen place. It helped that they had the pretend food in the window, but they also had a sign advertising an English menu. We were ushered to the 2nd floor where there were 3 or 4 small tables and we had our lunch.

We could see the Tokyo Tower from street, which was cool. We saw this all lit up when we were coming into the city from the airport the first evening.

I couldn't resist the picture of the pedicab.

Below is the entrance of the Meiji Shrine. This was a beautiful walk in the middle of the city into a wooded area.

This explains the photos below of the Sake barrels.

There were a ton of Japanese families at the Shrine having their pictures taken. I snuck a few photos of them since they were in beautiful kimonos.

Another family photos - doesn't matter that they aren't my family, does it?

The real treat while we were there was that there was a Japanese wedding going on. The bride is below. They proceeded through the center of the shrine and people parted for them to pass. It was really neat.