Hello blavellers!
So it's our second day here in Tokyo and we saw sooo much today! Our day started with the breakfast buffet here at Hotel Villa Fontaine and I was very proud of myself for choosing only Japanese breakfast food and not western! (It's not really all that out there anyway, it's really yummy!) We then walked from here (Mita) to Hinode Pier (about 1 - 2k) to catch a Sumida River Cruise. It took 35 minutes to get from Hinode Pier to Asakusa and it was just lovely although, I fear for John because he seems to have some obsession with photographing bridges and buildings... you'll see when you get to the pictures! :)
Once we got off at Asakusa we decided to walk to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park which was about another 1-2k although there was so much to see! We discovered that Asakusa is much more traditional then Shinjuka which we saw yesterday. Shinjuka seems to be a business district where as Asakusa had all these awesome lanes with shops lining each side and not just any shops, really beautiful old world style shops and heaps of florists! Oh my florist friends, you would love Tokyo! The flower shops don't have the coolest designs but they do have gorgeous fresh flowers!
So anyway, we happen to stumble upon a temple called Sensoji. It was the first place we saw other westeners and it was very touristy but pretty cool all the same. People were rattling these boxes where they got a piece of paper from and then tie them to some lines... some sort of Buddhism ritual I would hazard a guess. Take a look at the pictures, very cool!
After that we wandered down some more very awesome traditional lanes and streets and by this time unfortunately for John I was a bit grumpy! But... we finally found the Tokyo National Museum where we had lunch and I walked around the grounds with an umbrella like any good old nanna would do (when in Rome!) and took a look at their permanent displays. It was pretty cool, very centred around Buddhism though so we didn't really get to see any other interesting facts on Japan's history.
Having had enough of walking(!!!) we decided to take the train to Akihabara (electric town) and took a look around. It was very well... electric town! We were kinda surprised at the lack of new awesome stuff though. There was some cool stuff, don't get me wrong but we couldn't even find any i-phones???
Anyway, we'd kinda had enough by then and came back to the hotel for a bit and then took off again for dinner. Sooo, dinner.... well, we actually ended up in a Japanese restaurant trying to be a western restaurant which we kinda knew before we got in but kinda not... Anyway, the food was lovely and when we asked for Sake (not having had it yet) we discovered that they only did premium Japanese beer, wine or cocktails!!! No Sake!!! Devastated we just had to find somewhere to experience this Sake business and so we found a gorgeous little restaurant/bar where no-one spoke English except for Sake! It was quite funny because it took a while for both sides to understand that they wanted us to order food and we didn't want to order food! But in the end, universal hand gestures did the job and we had our Sake (which was totally not what I expected and ok really) and that's the end of the day.
Can I just say one thing, we absolutely love Tokyo, the people are so so so friendly, the place is extremely clean and the prices of food and tourist attractions are really reasonable. We definitely think we'll be back! :)
