Tokyo Trip Part 4

Day 3 continued...
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I forgot to add that the tour we're on was set up through the concierge desk at the New Sanno. I set it up ahead of time because I heard that on weekends they are usually full in advance. They picked us up at the hotel in the morning and would have taken us back if we hadn't skipped out of the tour early...
After stopping at the Meiji Shrine our tour continued with driving past Akasaka Guest House and the National Diet (government) building. Both of those were on the wrong side of the bus for me to get pictures. The next place we stopped was the Imperial Palace East Gardens. 

We got to wear these awesome stickers all day!

After the Imperial Palace gardens (we didn't get to see the Imperial Palace as part of our tour...add that to next time's agenda) we drove through Ginza which is an upscale shopping area and then went to lunch. We had a very traditional meal for lunch. Most of the food was ok, however they had prepared it ahead of time and pretty much everything was cold. We were not fans of the tofu, the lotus root tastes ok but has a very firm almost crunchy texture.

From clockwise from bottom center: main plate was 3 differnt types of chicken, rice, tofu with a sauce,
renkon (lotus root), tempura fried shrimp and vegetables, salad, pickled cucumbers, carrot, daikon radish and soup.

Hama-Rikyu Garden was then first stop after lunch. It was a traditional Japanese style garden. There were also some old duck blinds that we found.

Warning about hornets...there is a variety here that
can be deadly...or so I've heard...and anyone that knows
my fear of any flying stinging insect would know I was
not thrilled. At least I didn't see the sign til we were leaving!

The next part of the tour was the Sumida River Cruise, we went from the Hinode Pier to Asakusa. We passed under 13 bridges during the cruise and saw old and new parts of Tokyo along the river.

There were some interesting looking tour boats!

The tall tower second from left is the Tokyo Sky Tree,
the gold building is Asahi Beer Tower (company headquarters).
It's designed to look like a glass of beer with foam on top.
The black building with the golden flame on the right is the
Asahi Super Dry Hall. Known to most people as the "golden turd." 

Once we arrived at Asakusa we went to Nakamise Shopping Street and Asakusa Kannon Temple (Sensoji). There were soooo many people! We didn't spend much time looking at the goods for sale, but I think you could find just about any souvenir possible!

Purification with incense.

At this point we bailed on the tour, had we continued we would have driven by Kappabashi (a shopping street), Uneo and Akihabara (area with lots of electronics stores). We chose to leave the tour because we were near the Tokyo Sky Tree and felt like we could do some more exploring rather than ride back to our hotel and then ride the train to somewhere.

We found our way to the Tokyo Sky Tree. The tallest tower in the world, not the tallest building. It's 637m (2,090ft) tall. In comparison the Willis Tower (Sears Tower) in Chicago is 1,451. So it's pretty tall! Supposedly it is built to withstand some pretty major earthquakes, but I'm not so sure I'd like to venture up to the observation deck. Maybe I'll change my mind some day...

A beer vending machine!

Just sitting along a river having a drink, watching
the sun go down and the Sky Tree light up

We headed back to Asakusa to find some supper. We had some Turkish kebabs from a small street stand that were awesome.

From Asakusa we found a train route to take us as close as possible to the Rainbow Bridge. It has a pedestrian route and we went about halfway across. The views of the river and city were great.

Day 4...
Headed back to Misawa on the bus. It took a couple extra hours due to an accident shutting down the toll road and us having to take some back roads. Something like 11 hours total.

Keenan decided to eat a piece of his muffin wrapper.

My lunch, pork cutlet curry.

Keenan's lunch, some sort of chicken. It tasted pretty fishy and wasn't that good.

Vending machine, sells hot dogs, french fries, etc.

I almost bought this, hard to resist happiness,
but if Pine actually meant pine and not pineapple
 it was going to be interesting...wasn't feeling adventurous

And that finally concludes our Tokyo trip!