OLD TOKYO

---

CHRIS

We went to a very old town where we did a lot of walking. We saw some kids on a school excursion and they were playing a game of hookeye which I did too and I was 5mm away from getting them on the hooks. We had yummy fried rice for lunch and had a very good hot chocolate. After that we went up to the Buddhist temple but it was closed so we went to a museum where we had to take our shoes off as we were walking on bamboo matting and we saw some samurai costumes some swords and guns. We saw how heavy the chest of gold would have been.

We went to the Buddhist statute place with a 534 Buddhist people who were doing different things. Some of them were like Buddhas of water and fire and my favourite one, Buddha of picking your nose. Just so you know the photo of me picking my nose next to the statute, I am only pretending.

In the afternoon we went to electric town which had huge buildings of just electric items inside. We went to a huge shopping centre filled with TVs and watched TV with 3D glasses, but it was in Japanese, so the movie Cars II sounded very different.

MATTHEW

On Friday we caught the express train to Kawagoe, the thing that is famous about Kawagoe is that its’ one of the few places that survived the war unbombed. We got to see what Tokyo would have looked a bit like pre-war. After we walked around the town we went to see the 500 disciples of Buddha, well 534 but that doesn’t really matter. These were a series of small statues in the garden of a Buddhist temple and each one represented a different mood or character. We found one that was picking his nose, looking quite satisfied. The temple was older than 16^th Century and in the temple we saw all the Shoguns swords and armour. The gardens at the back of the temple were breathtaking. We also saw lots of silk paintings and a nice Japanese man took us to the secret room of the temple and showed us the heavy chests that treasures were stored in.



Next we took the train to Akihabara, the electric city. You can tell by the name that there was plenty of electronics there, including Yodobashi which is the largest camera store in the world. Everybody was there, from Westerners to Buddhist monks. Everybody needs electronics. We then had dinner at a shabu shabu restaurant, which is where you cook the dinner yourself on a gas plate in the middle of the table.

---

Photos

The Picking Nose Buddha
It was unexpected

Old architecture
A good example of pre-war Tokyo

More disciples
Couldn't help it

Temple Gardens
A nice view for the Shogun