The Imperial Palace Gardens, Sensoji Temple and Tokyo Skytree

Ohayou Gozaimasu, everyone! Or I guess since it's early evening on the US eastern seaboard as I write this, konbanwa! Yesterday was jam-packed with sightseeing, and in a lot of ways reinforced the opinion that freestyling this trip (ie, travelling without formal tour guides) was the best way to do this.

After our trip to Akihabara the previous day, we were pretty wiped out, mainly because we walked more or less non-stop for about 9 hours, except to stop for lunch or that one break for me to play SSF4. On this day, Rod and I were a little more determined to pace ourselves, just in case we wanted to go out later and see the Tokyo nightlife. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

We started the day with breakfast at our new favorite fast-food place a couple of blocks from our hotel. Don't get the wrong idea, this place serves ramen, and different entrees over rice and miso soup and salad with most all their entrees. Rod got the curry rice and almost died because it was so good, and I had some kinda pork dish with chicken katsu and rice with miso. And holy crap, it's cheap and GOOD.   We've been there everyday since we've been in Tokyo and it's saved us a lot of money:



So after that big breakfast, we plotted out our day and headed out on the tokyo Metro to visit the Imperial Palace Gardens. We didn't have to go too far since we can see a section of the gardens from our hotel, but damn that place is huge!  And beautiful.  The Gardens are basically to Tokyo what Central Park is to New York City. But then, it's much more than that, since it is a heritage site, and not just green space. We entered the gardens through the Otemon Gate and toured the east gardens:

Speaking for  myself and given the time of year, I was excited to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. It was a bit disappointing to see most of the cherry blossoms on the ground. No frolicking for me:


Or, actually, maybe a little frolicking:


We finished walking around the gardens decided to make our way over to Akasuka to visit Sensoji Temple. But before that we had to stop and get some lunch.  We decided that it was probably a good time to find a little hole in the wall ramen shop to beat our hunger, and we did!  The ramen was really good, and definitely better that the stuff we had in Akihabara the previous day:

Now, Sensoji Temple is arguably the most famous religious site in Japan and probably the center of Japanese Buddhist culture. So to some extent, we were prepared to see a large number of tourists and perhaps pilgrims at the gate of the Temple. However, the sheer number of both Japanese and foreign visitors to the site wrecked the shit out of all five of my senses. Not to mention the long bazaar of shops lining the path to the temple itself- it was clear that this was the place to get souvenir shopping done.


There were pastries, candy, kimonos, chopsticks, bandanas, toys, figurines, and even a few traditional weapons like swords and daggers on sale along the whole street, which ran for about 1/2 mile right up to the last gate to the temple. There were quite a number of small shops just off that main thoroughfare, and I even noticed a small ryokan or two.

Once we finally made it to the temple, we couldn't escape the sheer sense of scale and scope of the scene we were witnessing. There were huge number of schoolchildren there for some reason, I should mention, for no other reason that we noticed that they were there.  Rod and I each did a buddhist prayer and lit incense:


And proceeded up the temple steps to see the monks praying and performing a ceremony. We also each drew omikuji (well, I drew one, Rod drew a second after getting a bad fortune the first time):


Once we got our fill of Sensoji (sorry, Jesus!) we headed over to the Skytree, which was just a single train stop away.  The Skytree is the tallest structure in Japan and the tallest structure in the world.  It basically takes over from the famous Tokyo tower as the main broadcaster of terrestrial television signals in Japan.  Surrounding the Skytree is a huge mall which has what might be the biggest grocery store I have ever seen with my own eyes. We tried to get tickets to the observation deck (which were reasonably priced at around 2300 yen), but for some reason the deck was closed just before we arrived. We decided to take a load off and do some people watching, since our feet were tired and there were a lot of people who apparently wanted to be watched.


We picked up a couple snacks and made the relatively long trip back to our hotel in Chiyoda. We had a mind to try hitting up some of the nightlife later on, but after getting dinner (again at our favorite fast food joint) and grabbing some snacks and drinks at the corner store, we were pretty wiped out and were in no condition to do any kind of partying. So, that was it for the day.