heading towards zojo-ji temple

today being our first full day in tokyo, i wanted to make the most of it. i got up and showered at 6am, followed by everyone else so that we were all ready by 8am. it was a cloudy day so probably all of my pictures are kinda bland but at least it wasn't raining. the news reports keep noting that there is a chance of rain for the next few days. we used our rail passes and took the yamanote line loop to zojo-ji temple. we were in the midst of tokyo rush hour traffic. it was insane! the train stations were so packed. it was just like i have heard/read about but never experienced until now. there we were, waiting for the next train, hoping we would fit. as foreigners, we thought we were the last in the train. but no, you can squeeze in more! one of the workers pushed in about 5 more rows of people. needless to say, it was tight!

zojo-ji temple wasn't that far of a walk from the train station. i was worried about the distance because i had read various reports from 5 minutes to 10 minutes and also that it was an uphill walk that could be tiring. perhaps there was a minor grade increase but it was definitely not an uphill hike! we walked casually and stopped a bit for pictures and to soak the reality that we are all in japan! woo hoo! the mexicans gawked and stared and we japanese explained things and watched out for them. i think at first we were still a little out of spirits from the night before and getting up early.

zojo-ji temple and tokyo tower

zojo-ji turned out to be really nice. it's quite spacious in the midst of all this concrete. kinda like central park in new york i suppose. you don't realize how precious this sort of thing is until you go up tokyo tower and see how cramped the city is, except for zojo-ji, the imperial grounds, and perhaps another place or two. i was going to cut this out of the itinerary at one point because i thought we could skip tokyo tower and this part of town by going to a free observatory but this is the sisters' first time to japan so let's give them the highlights and not be complete tightwads. i also just want to mention for those not familiar with japanese that "ji" means temple and that is why i separate it with a hyphen. i could very well just say zojo temple because zojo-ji temple is redundant.

inside zojo-ji temple

after looking around the temple, we walked to tokyo tower which is just behind and across the street. very close. very convenient for tourists to hit two spots with one train station. some people complain that the tower is ugly, expensive, etc. well, perhaps it is but i wasn't going to knock it down and not show it to those who have never been! i don't think it's particularly that ugly or anything, it's just not beautiful. towers are generally not beautiful. i really like the contrast between modern and ancient japan as juxtaposed by the image of the tower and temple next to each other. i think that was my main reason for keeping this on the itinerary.

like sky tower in auckland and probably many towers that tourists can pay to enter, there is a low-level observation tower and then a much higher level that you pay extra to go up. we're here, might as well go for the full thing! we rode a couple different elevators to get to the very top. the weather was not nice enough to see all the way to mt. fuji but they say you can on a clear winter day. also like sky tower, there are some thick glass panels on the floor that one can peer down and even stand on. it's always nerve-racking to do this! there was a photo booth there and i thought it was for stickers--we love to take photo stickers! but it was just for photos. :(

lunch at mominoki house: 7 kinds of vegetables

we walked back to the train station to ride the loop line, continuing clockwise (and not returning to ueno) to harajuku for lunch at mominoki house. we walked around to omotesando-dori street as we were hungry and i did not want temptation to peer into every store on takeshita-dori street delay us! (again with the hyphen thing, "dori" means street.) it's pretty much an organic restaurant and vegetarian friendly. we could tell by the photos everywhere that stevie wonder had dined there. my mom ordered a fish dish, twiddle thumbs's sister ordered a chicken dish, and twiddle thumbs and i both had the tofu steak with ginger sauce, brown rice, miso soup, 7 kinds of vegetables, and i had chinese gourd tea. it was a pretty good lunch! very nice atmosphere in the small restaurant. we had a tucked in little table. it's like you walk down a couple steps and the table is in a little room but not completely isolated from the rest of the restaurant. it's just nice ambiance.

meiji jingu

after lunch, we walked up takeshita-dori towards the train station. twiddle thumbs and her sister had fun looking at the shoes. i did manage to see a "i love tokyo" t-shirt in black as i had been wanting one but i didn't bother to look at the price and sizes. i just figured they wouldn't have my size and i didn't want to disappoint myself. plus, i want to save my money for some serious record shopping! after looking around a bit, we went to meiji-jingu shrine which is just behind the train station. it's part of yoyogi park. you're catching on that "jingu" means shrine, right? at this point i should also mention that all temples are buddhist and all shrines are shinto. we really don't have all this jazz where my mom is from so it's one of the things i learned while researching the trip. of course it's something all japanese know but i only lived there for 3 years as a kid so what the fuck do i know.

purifying myself at meiji-jingu

meiji-jingu was another place i was considering cutting out of the itinerary and i'll tell you why. it's a shrine dedicated to the emperor and empress of the meiji era and i hate royalty and worshiping royalty! (hey, i'm american with an okinawan mother, it's only logical for me to have an anti-monarchy stance.) plus, this is back in the day when japanese royalty was divine and royal divinity caused a lot of headaches and needless death. however, while researching the trip and while in japan, i was reminded of the good things that this particular emperor did. it was during his reign that japan became modern and restructured. the shrine is very subtle too and if i didn't already know it was for the meiji emperor i would've never thought twice about the name meiji since there was nothing blatantly about the emperor on the grounds we saw. by the way, the meiji period was 1868-1912 and my grandfather was actually born during the meiji period!

hachiko

after viewing the shrine and browsing the gift shop, it was too late to see anywhere else touristy. now it's time to see the city come to life! we took the loop line to shibuya which is just next door. we went there so twiddle thumbs could finally see her beloved hachiko statue! i swear, that's all she has talked about ever since watching an episode of "the amazing race" when they go to japan and have to find hachiko. it's just a statue of a dog but she must see it. but there was another point to going to shibuya. the intersection! it's one of the world's busiest crosswalks. we didn't even see it during a peak time because i'm sure it gets more crowded than this but it was fun to just watch the pedestrians cross for several lights. we walked through it too and with all those people you would think it's chaos but it's japan so it's organized chaos. shibuya also has tons of shopping and i'm all about the record shopping. there is the world's biggest tower records there. however, i've also read it used to be the biggest. if it's not the biggest anymore then it's probably #2 and that's good enough for me. 7 floors of stuff, man! i saw a couple things i was looking for though i didn't buy anything.

so many people that the taxi is stuck in the crosswalk

we were getting hungry and looking for a place to have dinner as we walked around shibuya. we settled on dining at a vietnamese restaurant. i think this is the only place you can have cilantro and drink tamarind in japan. walking back towards the train station, we saw tokyu hands which is a famous shop in japan. if we had time, i would go! but we didn't really and were tired. they have pretty much everything i heard. a lot of build it yourself stuff ever since that craze hit japan thanks to the recession. the japan i know was during the economic boom and no one ever built anything yourself or bought used goods. times have changed. now there's probably a used shop for everything in japan. especially in tokyo!

also on the way back to the train station i noticed recofan and i just had to go in. it's a used record store and damn it i have to buy some used cds here! i could order them new on amazon but i want to save money plus a lot of things i'm looking for are out of print. i didn't see a single used store in harajuku and that was very disappointing. times have also changed in that respect because it used to be good for record shopping. recofan wasn't exciting but it was a good size and had lots of cds, dvds, and even vinyl. i found a few buck-tick albums on vinyl but i have all that. i did snag the alternate cover for an album on vinyl. it was probably the cover used for the first batch or something. i knew of this alternate cover but i never researched why there is an alternate cover. i had a long list of cds i was looking for but i found very few and not the ones at the top of my list. i decided i better pick up several from the bottom of my list because this will probably be my only chance to record shop and i don't want to leave japan empty-handed.

we went back on the loop line and my mom and twiddle thumbs's sister were so tired that they went back to the hotel to pass out. while twiddle thumbs and i were also dead tired, we did not want to head back without seeing a little more of tokyo so we went to shinjuku. we walked over to disk union, another used record shop that i read rave reviews of and it totally sucked! i was so disappointed that i was heartbroken. there was a citibank next door so we used the atm to get some cash out. we noticed an internet cafe on the way to the record shop and headed back there to check email. it wasn't an internet cafe at all! it was a cafe with a couple computer terminals. we had to order drinks to use it. we couldn't even check our email as our server was blocked. at least we gave our feet enough rest to make it the rest of the way back to the hotel! we bought some food at the convenience store inside ueno station and across the street from the hotel.

today's expenses in yen:
¥6500 hotel
¥1428 tokyo tower entrance fee (including the higher observatory platform)
¥500 photos at tokyo tower
¥1500 lunch
¥1300 dinner
¥9103 used cds/vinyl
¥555 internet cafe
¥520 snacks and breakfast for tomorrow
plus a couple drinks from vending machines throughout the day to hydrate