There was a holiday this past Monday, which meant that I had a 3-day weekend. Ayako and I went up to Tokyo for my first real tourist visit of Tokyo. We started off in the area of Harajuku. The modern Harajuku looks like this:
Lots of shops for young people as well as for people who like to dress like it's Halloween everyday (called Cosplay here)...sorry no pictures. The station divides this area with a shrine on the other side which is very quiet and peaceful. So it was interesting to see that the subways on this line are very modern, but yet the station sign looks a more traditional style:
The shrine on the other side is called Meiji shrine. Here's some photos from there:
In the next picture, I'm pointing at the sake from Hamamatsu area:
We then went shopping south of Harajuku in an area called Omotesando:
In the evening, we visited an area called Ebisu and had dinner in a izakaya (similar to a pub) where we drank sake and ate sashimi:
The freshest meat was from the fish on the left, who we called Bob. He had just come from the fish tank and so was still twitching while we ate him.
The next day, we did some shopping in Shibuya, which has a large crossing area for pedestrians:
Next, we went shopping in the fancier area of Aoyama. The Prada store was definitely an interesting building:
We then found an interesting store that had a dungeon-looking entrance. Downstairs it had a cool store with CDs, magazines, books...and a big picture of Thom Yorke:
An even lower level had expensive gothic-style clothes:
We continued walking around that area. I bought some t-shirts and saw some neat graffiti:
That night, we met our friend Vicki, who used to work at my school, and her boyfriend, Dwane, near Shinjuku:
We went to an izakaya on the 29th floor of a building, so we could have dinner there and have a nice view of the city (sorry, no picture).
Our last day in Tokyo, we went to visit Yasukuni shrine:
This shrine is controversial since the prime minister sometimes goes there to remember the war dead, but some war criminals are also buried there, so China and Korea always get upset if he goes there. Anyways, it was interesting to go check it out. Finally, we went to Asakusa area, which has a neat clock on a building made by Seiko that opens up each hour and has little figures doing a dance to music:
...very cute to watch.
We also walked down a popular (so extremely crowded) walkway with lots of Japanese souvenirs. Not really that great an area but it had a nice gate:
Overall, it was interesting to go to Tokyo, although a bit expensive.
As a side note, this is my 100th posting about Japan...Yeah!!!
There was lots of people to watch these fireworks, so it took us a long time to get home by car...in fact 2 hours when it should take 30 minutes. Of course the first hour was spent trying to leave the parking lot. Next weekend we are going to another fireworks display but in a smaller town so hopefully the travel time is shorter. There is another firworks display in a medium-sized city next weekend as well which is 6 times larger than tonight's, but that will probably mean that the travel time home will also be as long.
Half way through our trip, we transferred to an older train with no windows. This took us for about an hour. 
We bought bento boxes before to have on the trip:
