When asking directions, don't be surprised to get a different answer every time

Today was by the far the nicest day we've been in Tokyo...but it was still quite chilly. I actually stopped in a 100 Yen Shop (the Japanese equiv. of a dollar store but 10 times better and carrying stuff you actually want and need!) and picked up some gloves towards the end of the day because I was so cold! However it was sunny and beautiful and I really enjoyed my day :)

Around 11 o'clock we met up with my friend Becky, a girl I've known from middle school who lives near me in State College. She is studying abroad this semester in Meikai University in Chiba, just outside of central Tokyo. We decided to go on a walking tour of Shiodome and Asakusa as provided by Frommers.com. They actually have some really nice and comprehensive walking tours that are a really nice and cheap way to see and do a lot in one day. I would definitely suggest checking them out for wherever your travels may take you.


We started our tour at Hama Rikyu Gardens just off the Shiodome Station on the Yurikamome Line. Its a really pretty garden with sea water lakes and rivers running through it. It looked so different from how it looked in the summer and we came in through a different entrance, so it took me a while to realize that I had been here last time I was here! Mom was upset that we were doing things today that I had all ready done, but I was actually okay with it since last time we had been so rushed and I didn't really get to take my time and experience things the way I wished we had since our group had tried to cram so many things into one day.


We wandered around some more and when we back tracked to see the flower fields and the 300 year old pine, we were greeted with a real treat! In the grass field next to the flower field, a couple in full traditional Japanese wedding garb were taking some of their posed wedding pictures!

It was really cool and we never expected to see that! It was really cool! If you want to see the video that goes along with this click here. If you want to see some other videos from the gardens you can click here.

Shortly after we hopped a boat to catch a lovely ride up the Sumida River to Asakusa. Again, I've all ready done this, but I enjoyed it so much for the first time and it was part of the recommended tour, so we did it :) After arriving we made our way to Senso-ji, one of the most famous temples in the Tokyo Proper, and you've probably seen it or its Giant red paper lantern in a post card somewhere before. Its massive.

Before we went to the temple, we stopped at the sweets shop next to the temple called Tokiwado Kaminari Okoshi, which specializes in flavored rice sweets. We bought the strawberry. Soooo delicious :)

From there we headed down Nakamise-dori, the road of shops, vendors and mini-markets that sell everything kitschy that you have no possible need for, or at least not a frequent need for, but really want anyway because its so gosh darn cool or pretty, that leads to the temple. Because it was a Saturday, it was really crowded, but really entertaining to look all the fun little things the place had to offer...umbrellas, fans, aidoru key chains, elaborate hair pieces, kimonos/yukatas, shows, books, food...everything!

Once we got to the main part of the temple though...we found....this....



After laughing that off, we went to go get our fortunes...which involved a little silver canister that you shake until a stick falls out of the hole on the bottom. On that stick there is a number in Japanese Kanji, and that number corresponds to a numbered drawer. In that drawer are pieces of paper that tell you if you have good, regular or bad fortunes among other things. Mom got a really good fortune, I got regular fortune (picture left) and Becky got a really depressing bad one that basically said nothing in life would work out for her....so here she is demonstrating what happens when you pull a bad fortune.



After all our adventures around Senso-ji we went to go drop Becky off at the Tawaramachi station so she could find her way home...this proved to be much, much, much harder than originally thought. I don't know what it is about the Japanese people in that Asakusa area, but none of them seem to know where this station is OR how to get to it...really. We walked around for probably 45 minutes - 1 hour, seeing parts of Asakusa I'm sure most tourists normally don't because its much more everyday life than anything else...we asked countless people how to get to this station, and every time we either go the wrong directions or they were completely different from the last set of directions we had been given. It was...quite an interesting adventure to say the least...I'm pretty sure that between all those people we got sent in one big circle...thought I have no way of verifying this. It was very....frustrating honestly.

After we parted ways with Becky, my mom and I went to go find Sometaro, an okonomiyaki restaurant recommended by Frommers. It was a little hard to find, especially because the building and sign were so discreet, but it was well worth it. It was a little restaurant with a home feel. You had to step up onto a tatami mat floor after taking up your shoes, and you sat on a pillow on the floor around a little table with a little grill in the middle of it, where you could make your own food, or if it was something a little more complicated such as pizzaten you could ask your waiter how to show you how to make it. Mom was also very surprised when she ordered a beer in the bottle, thinking it would be smaller than the draft, and she got this monstrosity. I looked at the label....633ml!!!! Needless to say...I wasn't very surprised when she hit the sack around 7:30/8 o'clock tonight. :)

I also seemed to have noticed again what Misako meant when last time I was here, she said I had a certain gift for making Japanese people like me an open up. There have been several occasions in which I just somehow randomly start talking to a Japanese person, whether it be because I'm asking for directions, help, advice or am just in the vicinity of them and they happen to hear me talking Japanese...and they keep talking for me, for quite a while I might add. In America, and especially State College, I don't find this abnormal...but when this happened at the grocery store one time two years ago, Misako assured me that it was not normal for Japan, as Japanese rarely speak to people they don't know. O_O....Now my mother doesn't believe me that Japanese don't talk to people they don't know,because every time she turns around, someone is talking to me. Tonight alone, I had a pair of Japanese women at Sometaro talk to me for awhile (Mom liked them because they insisted she looked to young to be my mother!) and a married couple on the train talked to me for a few stops as well.

I guess I just have that kind of face :) Hehe.