Day 2 - Sensoji Temple & the Imperial Palace

It was a busy day, so much so that I fell asleep in my clothes as soon as I got back to the hotel. I had breakfast in the Garden Tower which is on the 40th floor of one of the buildings in the hotel complex. The view was wonderful as the haze was not yet at full strength. I had french toast and sushi, an interesting combination, and managed to eat everything with chopsticks.

Matt was my traveling companion again and had a list for recommendations from a friend who had lived in Tokyo so my target worked for him as well. We took the subway,which is impressively clean, well marked, and has working air conditioning. New York could learn a few things.

The goal was Sensoji Temple which is the oldest temple in Tokyo. It a beautiful five-story building although a bit of a tourist trap.  There were people praying to statues of various gods, burning incense in a large caldron or getting their fortunes using a process where you shake a can until a single stick comes out of it. The stick has the number of a drawer that contains a sheet with your fortune. If the fortune is bad, you tie it to something that looks line an indoor clothes drying rack.  I had a good fortune. Around the temple were numerous small shrines and a temple for another religion.  A large group of monks marched to the temple at midday.

There were stalls where you could get a fish or a tentacle on a stick that the vendor would barbecue for you. A man was walking his pig which apparently was just as unusual in Japan as it would be in the US. There was a small garden near the temples with different places to pray to the various gods and a small stream that was filled with koi. It was a small oasis from the press of the tourists a short distance away.

It was a short walk, relatively speaking, to go to the Sky Tree, which was the tallest structure in the world for a while. We saw several rickshaws. The drivers (I wonder if that is the correct term) were, as expected, in very good shape. The temperatures and humidity were in the high 90s. I was soaked just from walking, I can't image pulling a cart at a pace I couldn't match without the cart.



I jumped off the metro a few stops early and took off by myself to explore the grounds of the Imperial Palace. It was a very quiet place with beautiful gardens. Similar to Central Park as it was a space where you could forget that you were in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world but also different because there weren't as many people and certainly nobody was making noise. I stopped for a while to sketch a tea house then headed to the hotel to change for an evening meeting. I discovered there were no exits on the west side of the public space because that was where the Emperor lived. I had to hurry, breaking the rules by jogging around the perimeter of the palace in the wrong direction - apparently runners are only allowed to go counter clockwise.

A client meeting was followed by a team dinner at a restaurant underneath the metro in the Financial District. No space is wasted and the entire street was filled with high-end restaurants.