Tonight we got off at a train station, with the intention of finding the oldest shrine in Japan. We were hungry, so we stopped in a sushi restaurant in the country. Asahi big bottles were 600 yen, at which point we decided to drink a few of them. Now, slightly drunkenly finding our way back to Osaka.

Yay!

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When you rely on pointing as a primary communication method, sometimes there are misunderstandings. We didn’t want 3 giant beers…but bottoms up! 😀

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On a lengthy train to the countryside and we started talking with a Japanese gentleman who spoke excellent English and wanted to show us how to get to our destination. So he got on this lengthy train ride with us. While here, we started speaking with two little old ladies across from us who had no English, but one of which had been to the interior of B.C. 20 years ago. Nik pulled out his phone to show her a recent photo of his trip to a glacier she had seen back then.

The gentleman changed his day to visit a shrine out this way, and the ladies were on a train tour of sakura trees in the area.

It was a good time to talk with some random people.

(I have a ton of photos and stories from yesterday, but played a game instead of doing photos last night. :))

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Breakfast this morning was waffles. Because waffles are awesome.

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Not a lot of photos this day.

The train!

We had udon for dinner. In giant bowls.

Cat themed waffle place!

I bought 3 different colors of Kirin beer. I only drank the green last night and it was a comfortable time, as advertised.

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The mostly last thing we did on Thursday was to go to the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest tower in the world at 635m. There are observation decks at 350m and 450m, although the taller one you have to pay more to get to.

First, a random photo of NIk and I heading from our sushi lunch to the Shinjuku train station. There is construction going on all over the city, and the city is many layered. There are 2-4 layers of shops and rail lines under the ground, ground lever, then multiple elevated road and rail ways. A typical commercial building is 8 floors high, and has retail stores on all the levels. Businesses have large signs on each floor to let you know what you’ll find on that floor. That, plus the language barrier, make it difficult to find what you’re looking for – we spend a lot of time trying to pattern match Japanese symbols without knowing what they are!

Here’s the Skytree from below. It’s very tall.

After the tower we had some time to kill on our last day in Tokyo. We were all exhausted and sore from walking all the time, but no one wanted to go home, so we planned to go to the Rainbow bridge which is a bridge across the Tokyo Bay. We’d planned to walk across it, which was said to be really nice, but we got on the brand new train and got front row seats and it was warm and seated and the view was scrolling past us and we unanimously decided to stay there for the entire run of the train.

Bad news for me – on our way home my knee went from no conversation, to yelling at me with little warning. Over the years I’ve learned how to manage it pretty good, but most of my management techniques involve not walking for another 9 days. 😛 Thankfully today we have a morning of packing and cleaning, then an afternoon of taking a 3.5 hour train to Osaka, then finding our place for the next 2 nights and then…drinking?

And with this post I’m fully up to date!

After we left the Imperial Palace, we had some time before our lunch reservations so we wandered around that area for a bit.

Tokyo is like 9 cities melded together, and each one has a slightly different feel to it. This one felt more business like, with fewer shops and little streets. But we found a tiny Shinto temple hidden amongst the skyscrapers.

Shinto feels like a good religion to have if you’re going to pick one. There’s very little nonsense about whether there’s a God, I haven’t read about any particular hatred towards any particular minority group, nor about them coming to your door and asking if you’ve cleansed yourself today.  Sean and I learned the cleansing ritual at the Emperor Meiji’s shrine, so I performed it here. I’m not terribly spiritual, but once in a while it comes upon me, and I think that some of my more religious friends who might be reading would really enjoy Shinto as a thing.

We had reservations at a little sushi shop near Shibuya. This place had recently been reviewed by a blogger who lives in the area, talking about how authoritarian the chef is, how he likes it his way, but how his way is meant to bring you the most happiness about the food, and how he’s a warm guy at heart.

This was the most intense meal I’ve ever had. First off, this older married couple who run the place are fantastic. Such cool people. The gentleman would make a piece of nigiri, put it down, and insist that you eat it immediately. Where upon another piece would be almost instantly placed on the plate in front of you. It felt frenetic, like you couldn’t keep up.

At the end, the lady asked if we wanted more and we said maybe 1 more. 4 pieces later, they had opened a bottle of sake and he was drinking with us, shared bottles of this seaweed-based paste, more sake, more paste, strawberries, and all this after we’d indicated that we were done eating!

This was a great experience!

We went back afterwards to meet up with Sean, as he had decided that he didn’t want to join Nik and I for this meal. This is going to be a 3 post day, as I have a few photos of the Tokyo Skytree that I just don’t want to shove into this post!

This is the first chance I’ve had to catch up! Blogging setup is annoying me less than usual today, so I’ve managed to power through a few things!

We went to the Imperial Palace today, as it was 8 degrees and sunny, so reasonable weather to go outside and walk around. You can’t go inside any of the buildings, but the grounds are really nice.

I love the photos of the old style buildings, with the skyscrapers behind them. 😛 This was a lot of walking, and personally I enjoyed it less than the gardens and shrine we saw the other day. Lots more shrines in our future, and lots more opportunity to compare and contrast them! 🙂

We went to a cat cafe!!

I bought a 300 yen pack of chicken to feed the cats. The downside, it really highlighted the fact that these cats are mercenaries. They only love you for so long as you have chicken in your hand, and no longer. That’s fine – one of the reasons I love cats is that they don’t ask for much. They love me when they want, and I love them when I want.

This cat was the most beautiful in the place, and s/he knew it.

KITTY ON A KITTY.

We had breaded pork on rice for dinner, then came home and rested and played some games. It’s been a lot of walking!

It was raining and 3 degrees and that sucked, so we took our plans to visit the Imperial Palace and found new plans to spend more time inside. We went for a nice sushi meal.

First, here’s a photo of a bunch of businesses that run from underneath the train tracks. Awesome.

Here’s the sushi place! Our chef was funny, and I’m starting to think that sushi is part performance art.

This shrimp was moving at the time I took the photo. The next photo is after it is medium boiled and put on rice.

And that’s photos of fish on rice!

We wandered around a toy store, tried to find a Japanese version of the board game King of Tokyo (we succeeded, but only the box was in Japanese, the game was still English 🙁 ) and tried to stay warm as best we could. No one prepared for near-freezing temperatures here!