Let's Explore Tokyo!

Happy Birthday America! The greatest way to celebrate is to celebrate in another country that we went to war with! Wooo! Anyway, we had the choice of going to a fish market before going to the temple. Julia, Kristen, Leo, and I all chose to stay behind and find our way to the temple ourselves. I didn’t really feel like waking up at 7 am. Instead, I woke up at 9 am. Finding our way to the Sensouji temple it was really interesting. It was mainly Julia leading the way because she was the only one who truly understood the train system. We actually ended up guessing which train to get on because we couldn’t figure out which color to get on. It turns out that we ended up getting on the right train which was just complete luck. It was insane! We arrived at Sensouji temple at around 10 am and it turned out that the rest of our group was going to be a half hour late. So to kill time, we walked through the shopping center that was right in from of the temple. There was actually a lot that I could look at, but most of it was repetitive because most of the material and items were essentially the same. However, I walked around for that half hour and explored the many shops. There were probably three rows of the shopping stores and they were all about a mile long. It was incredibly long. When the rest of the group did finally come, we walked through the temple. I loved this temple because in front of it, there was a big pot with smoke that you could pray over. It reminded me so much of being home and smudging with our sweetgrass and sage to pray with the smoke. It made me kind of homesick. 

Center of Sensouji-temple

Anyway, after I was finished looking around, Julia and I went with Mioko’s friend, who’s name I have forgotten. She was really sweet. She brought us down other streets and there was a street that was literally just orange. It was the coolest thing! It was also labeled orange, and it was pretty funny to me. When the whole group met back up again, we made our way to the Tokyo Sky Tower. When we got there, we bought tickets for the first level which was 350 meters in the air. Seeing Tokyo up in the Sky Tower was a very cool sight. There were buildings for miles! You couldn’t see grass at all and it seemed like all the buildings were stacked on each other. It was crazy! Later, we went up to the second level which was 450 meters high. It looked pretty much the same to me. What confused me the most though is that there were these robots that were displayed everywhere in the Sky Tower. I didn’t really know what they meant. I was told they were from some movie or T.V. show. When we came down from the Sky Tower, we went to the area where it was basically Anime land. We were there for a couple hours and Julia and I decided to sit in KFC because we didn't really know what to look at. After the couple hours there, we went back to the hotel. We had the choice of either eating as a group or by ourselves. Julia and I decided to eat in the restaurant that was in the hotel. Mainly because we really wanted to try their cheesecake. When we were down there, we saw a group come in and eat. It was a business dinner and there were like twenty people. They were also really loud and Julia and I couldn’t quite hear our own conversation. So, we ate the rest of our dinner and went back up to our room. We went to bed and called it a night. 

The Orange Street

View from Tokyo Sky Tower

Main street to Anime Land