Meeting the Emporer

January 2nd and amazingly it's one of only 2 days in the year when the Royal family greet the public. Couldn't possibly miss such an opportunity so up with the larks and to the Imperial Palace for more Japanese style herding and mass crowd control and we were in the grounds with every other Tokyo-ite waving our paper Japanese flags with the best of them!

Yet another experience to round off our stay.

Getting the hang of it

Well the city pretty much shut down for New Year making the search for dinner harder than it needed to be.

Found great place and managed to order all on our own. Sliced beef (rare) salad and a tofu and tomato salad was delicious and of course the obvious accompaniment being fish and chips with a curry mayonnaise! Don't laugh - all the Japanese were eating it so it wasn't a case of Brits abroad!

Left quite proud of ourselves for ordering a good meal not involving insects, raw fish, horse or entrails.

Stalls

Streets lined with food stalls. We gave the squid balls a miss!

Takeshita street

Well we found the street where all those funky people buy their clothes and hang out in crazy costumes around Tokyo. It's just one helluva crazy place! Taki to the max!

Time for lunch

Crispy chicken in teriyaki sauce wrapped in a steamed bun. Yum!

New Year Respects

Queued with a million people to get to the temple. A New Year tradition to make the first visit of the year. Amazing crowd control - there were stewards with walk / don't walk signs and megaphones to herd everyone round to throw money to the sound of ceremonial drums, buy fortune arrows and then tie their fortunes to bits of string. Quite an experience!

A walk in the park

Escaped the mayhem of the streets for a bit and spent some time walking around one of the biggest parks in Tokyo.