After seeing Sankeien Garden and Hikawa Maru, off we went to Tokyo. First stop is to buy Tokyo Skytree tickets for its observatory deck. This relatively new tower is a major attraction of the city and so early reservation for tickets is a must. After securing our passes, we then visited Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.
Sensoji Temple is a main place of worship for Buddhists. It was built in 645AD making it the oldest temple in Japan, and one of the most colorful too. It was already late in the afternoon when we got there, around 5:30PM and so we found out that we can no longer enter the temple as it closes earlier than we expected.
That said, we just roamed around the place and took some pictures. Here are some by the gates of the temple.
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| Pardon the droopy eyes. 0_o |
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| Imitating a poster we saw earlier in the day. |
And these are the ones right in front of the temple and the pagoda.
After taking out shots, Archie excused himself and went off to attend that Sunday's mass. Adrin and I had some food trip at Asakusa and tried the appetizing Takoyaki in one of the food carts. It was so so so good that I consider it the best Takoyaki I've eaten so far. Far from the cheap and heavily floured version in our local malls, that one was full of octopus and vegetables! They were also bigger and much more plump! Not only that, we also tried mochi-like fried buns with red bean filling. We liked them too and decided to take some home.
Again recharged by the yummy street food we had, shopping came next. Just outside the gates of the temple, there is the Asakusa market which is like our local "tiangge". We ensured to buy goodies for our family and some souvenir items requested by our officemates. Our finds were reasonably priced (based on nothing but our pesonal standards. haha) for such a tourist infested spot.
Next, we headed back to Tokyo Skytree for an adventure up in its observation deck. It is a fairly new tower in Tokyo city center which opened to the public last May 2012. At present, it is ranked as the second tallest tower in the world only after Dubai's Burj Khalifa.
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| Tokyo Skytree |
It was a long queue on the way up so we entertained ourselves while waiting until finally it was our turn to board that high-speed elevator. This information board greeted us at the deck.
And these city lights were what we saw when we looked out.
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| Bright lights. Big city. |
Just like most other observation decks I've visited, Tokyo Skytree also features a glass flooring from which you can see the ground below. Tokyo Skytree being taller and newer, I felt that the glass floors were lacking compared to that of Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai (which is older and smaller). Here the glass flooring were arranged like medium-sized tiles, while that of Oriental Pearl's were large panels of glass placed underneath your feet, with fewer grids.
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| A glass panel on which we walked and the view below |
Not missing to have some photo with this kind of background, we exerted all effort to have a picture of us together.
And of course the solo shots! :)
This is the first landmark tower that Adrin and I visited together so Tokyo Skytree will always remain special to me even if I find other towers more cooler and more exciting. And that wraps up our third day in Japan!
Read the rest of the Turning Japanese
Series here:
Part
7 - Shinjuku and Shibuya'Til the next one,
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