Japan, Day Two: Tokyo

In the morning we decided to go to the Tokyo National Museum, which has a huge collection of Asian art. It's in the middle of a large park with many other museums (and the zoo). Unfortunately, once we got there we learned the museum is closed on Tuesdays that follow a national holiday. Siggghhh. Anyway, at least we figured out how to get there and put it on the list to go later.

The Asakusa neighborhood was close by so we went over there. Asakusa is the closest thing Tokyo has to an old part of town, as most of the city was virtually destroyed in World War II.

This was the first time we saw these little vending machines, which sold a wide variety of items all over the country. The cat hats were the best ones, though.

We visited the Senso-ji temple (our first temple!) which was beautiful...

...but really crowded. This was one of the most crowded places we visited in all of Japan, actually.

In most of the temples they don't want you to take pictures inside, but there didn't seem to be any restrictions here.

So many people!

We walked around a little bit in Asakusa. This is the Tokyo Skytree. You can go to the top to look at the city.

This neighborhood had lots of little streets lined with shops, some packed with people and some quieter.

It also had a dog cafe! You hear about cat cafes a lot in Japan but I'd never heard of this. We learned there are all sorts of animal cafes - we saw a couple of owl cafes too but didn't visit.

Restaurants in Japan, both cheap and pricey, have plastic renditions of their menu items on display in the windows. It never, ever looks appetizing. I don't know what they're hoping to gain from this but it's very common.

We went into a little ramen place for lunch. The ceiling was fun.

This was our first official Japanese ramen and it was great!

Just what you'd expect. It was also cheap. We didn't find Japan to be expensive at all, contrary to popular belief. I never felt like I paid more for anything - food, gifts, admission to museums, hotels - than I'd pay in the United States. I'm sure you could opt for more expensive accommodations and restaurants if you wanted to, but there's no reason for it. This was not any more expensive than any other trip we've taken.

There's a large covered shopping area in Akasusa where we spent some time wandering to stay out of the sun. The first couple of days in Tokyo were hot and humid, although this second day was better than the first.

After this we took the train to Akihabara, the part of town famous for its electronics stores and anime culture.

We had a good time looking around in these multi-story electronics stores - lots of random weird stuff.

I will say, Japan has the least fun bookstores of any I've visited. Obviously I can't read any of these but all of the books are shrink-wrapped, too, so you can't even flip through them.

Rotatable head!

For dinner, we went to a restaurant one of my Japanese coworkers recommended, Shabusen. It was a few minutes' walk from our hotel in the fancy Ginza area, but tricky to find - we had to take this weird carpet-walled elevator to the 2nd basement and were having a few doubts about the situation.

Shabusen is shaba shabu restaurant, which means you cook your own food in a little pot of boiling water, which also means we had absolutely no idea what to do. We spent a lot of time watching everyone else trying to figure it out.

Eventually they brought us a little handout with instructions. The man sitting next to us also gave us advice which directly contradicted the handout, leading to much confusion.

They were all really nice and helpful, and in the end you can't really go wrong with thinly sliced beef and vegetables with noodles. It was great.