Tokyo

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Greetings to my blog readers! I am just beginning another travel adventure. I plan to go around the world again, this time in a westerly direction. So I am starting RTW2 in Japan. I arrived yesterday, but I don’t have much to tell you about that because I agree with the person who said that nothing is more boring than listening to the story of someone else’s travel delays. Today I spent my time exploring Tokyo and I managed to get in several sights. I started at the Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan Museum. This is a controversial place because the shrine’s purpose is to remember and venerate the nation’s war dead, including a number of officers who were convicted of war crimes in WWII. Photography is not allowed inside the shrine, but the museum permits photos of some of their exhibits, including the one I most wanted to see: a locomotive that ran on the so-called Death Railway in Burma. This is the railway that was being built in the movie Bridge on the River Kwai. I stopped for lunch at a noodle shop. I guess these shops are sort of like Japan’s version of fast food. There is a choice of menu items. I had three things: soup with noodles + vegetable + slice of meat, pot stickers, and a pile of rice. It was all good and more than I could eat. After lunch I visited a Buddhist temple called Senso-ji which reminded me of some of the pilgrimage sites I’ve seen in Europe in that the walk leading to it is lined with shops selling food, trinkets, and souvenirs to visitors. In the photo you can see the large temple building behind my head with little shops on either side and lots of pilgrims! The last place I visited today was the Edo-Tokyo Museum, a well-done modern museum that tells the history of the city of Tokyo (formerly called Edo). None of the pictures I took there came out well, so you’ll just have to take my word for how good it is.

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