We briefly admired the Ginsha district where the tour bus had dropped us off, and then found our way to the nearest train station to continue on our way. We got another giggle out of our sleeping travel companions. This was a girl dressed in a kimono who was FAST asleep. Note that I'd forgotten to take off my little tour sticker at this stage. Dork!
We got off the train at Hamamatsucho station, and this little mosaic stopped me in my tracks. It's the Manneken Pis! We saw the original little statue back in Belgium last year! The Japanese seem to really love copying famous world icons, huh? What with their statue of liberty, Eiffel-tower-esque Tokyo tower and Buckingham Palace replica, wow! Anyway, after we'd finished admiring the Manneken Pis, we found a cute little noodle place inside the train station that caught our eye for a speedy and cost effective lunch. It was nice!
We found our way to Hinode pier, and bought ourselves tickets for a little cruise up the river, to see Tokyo from the water.
The other ferries were much fancier than ours.
Although ours certainly had some charm. Wish it had more effective air conditioning though!
We saw buildings and bridges...
And locks and buildings...
And more old fashioned buildings...
And more bridges. I had to include this shot, since I did such an excellent job of capturing the flag on the back of the ship.
It was good fun, but unfortunately we had been too far back in the line to nab ourselves a window seat in the air conditioned part of the boat, so we ended up standing in the back in the non-air-conditioning. It was a little hot.
If we took nothing else away from this day in Tokyo, it is a MASSIVE city!
With pretty bridges. Wonder if this one is modeled after the Tower Bridge in London?
The end of the ferry trip was just across the river from this rather interesting building. Apparently that sculpture was designed by Philippe Starck, who just happens to be the designer of my favourite chair!
We then spent a few very interesting hours wandering through the Asakusa markets.
There were so many people, it was a little insane. And we eventually realised that they weren't necessarily all shopping, they were actually predominantly locals visiting the Sensoji Temple, because we were there on the 31st of July, which was a special occasion of some sort. I can't for the life of me remember what! You can just see the entrance to the temple at the end of this street.
And in the opposite direction, there was a Tori gate with this giant red lantern! Tom's there to give it some scale.
There were streets upon streets upon streets of shops in this district.
Some had "Engrish" signs that made us scratch our heads a bit.
I'll never tire of it.
Amazingly enough, we turned down the prospect of "seafood & powerfood", and started making our way back towards the river again, which gave us some great views of Tokyo's Sky Tree, a building only recently opened that rivals Tokyo Tower.
We found some more intriguing shops. This was a shop absolutely full of soft toy dogs and cats.
It got prettier as night came on and the shops lit up.
Even the shops that were closed were pretty.
I just managed to prevent Tom from getting into a fight with this guy...
And everywhere around us there were girls in kimonos!
Sorry about the quality of this photo, but I only just managed to whip the camera out in time to capture it. Can you believe it? Dogs in kimonos?
As we got closer to the river, we got better views of the Sky Tree, all lit up for the night.
Unfortunately we also managed to get ourselves caught up in this.
There were crowds and crowds of people, all vying for a spot where they could see a firework show.
This was about as good as it got for us.
Well nearly. It actually took us a ridiculously long time to get out of there, because they had shut down the nearest train station because it was too close to all of the action.
We didn't really have a decent map of the area, so I insisted that if we could just walk far enough in some other direction, we would come across another train station. This theory was based on our experience thus far, that every few kilometres there's always another train station. And my theory was thankfully correct. We did get rewarded with this extraordinarily lanky train pusher, the only shot of one that I got the entire trip. He looked like a little Japanese person that had been put on one of those stretchy torture machines!
And on that very strange note, we ended our last full day in Tokyo. We were due to move on to Hiroshima the next day!
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