Saturday in Tokyo!

Ahhh....our first adventure in Tokyo! Due to jet lag we all woke up annoyingly early. This ended up working in our favor as we accomplished many things today. Namely: Modern Temples, Staring at the Japanese, Street Food, The Subway (fooorrrrr dayyyys!!), and in general just traipsing around Starstruck and soaking in the Japanese way of life. It was freezing again today and there was a lovely mix of rain and snow. Nothing, however could dampen our spirits! Here is our group so far: Shoji (Yoshi), Me (Peach), Dan (Bowser), Brett (Luigi), and Craig (Mario). Our fun German roommate took the picture. He is completely fluent in Japanese as well as English so he generally just kind of makes me feel incompetent. Great guy though!

As you can see from the pictures the stairs go on and on and we have to leave our shoes downstairs. Very interesting. The first place we headed to was Asakusa to see some Temple. The Temple itself was interesting, but we were all kind of let down to discover it was built in the 60's. I think we had more fun along the way taking pictures of the odd buildings, each other, and the Asians taking pictures of the Asians. We saw a bunch of stalls full of random touristy items and I even tried some sort of street food - I can't even begin to describe what it tastes like cause I have never had anything like it in my life! Like an odd salty marshmallow concoction.

We can't figure out what that giant gold turnip looking thing is on the top of the building but we all love it and keep taking pictures of it! The Japanese treat their temples with respect: they wash their hands before they go in, make offerings, and do some crazy rituals with incense. However, Shoji explained to me that although the identify with being Buddhist or Shinto barely anyone here practices it religiously. 

Shoji enjoyed chasing the pigeons with some small Japanese Child. Haha. I'll upload the rest of our exciting day later - everyone is hungry so it's time to brave the snow and grab some ramen!