Saturday

    Ginza.  This is a shopping paradise.  As well as the Sony showrooms there are some wonderful department stores.  Matsuya has an excellent milinery department which greatly impressed Roberta.

    Merlion on the street in Ginza.  I'm not sure of the significance of this.  The merlion is traditionally a symbol of Singapore, so maybe it is a kind of friendship thing?

    Buying tea at the food hall in Matsuya department store.

Saturday night was out to dinner with Mike and Erik (fellow Cisco-ites) at a yummy Japanese restaurant in East Shinjuku serving food on skewers.  The food is prepared and cooked in front of you and there is a huge variety of ingredients.  Some of our favourites were cheese wrapped with salmon, mushrooms in bacon, chestnut and prawns.

    This is the score card at the restaurant showing the maximum number of skewers people have eaten.  The men's highest score was 160 and the women's 125.  To put this in perspective, the most we could eat was 24 each!

    Neon lights in East Shinjuku.

    Roberta in the subway - train rushing past!

Sunday

Our apartment is near a canal and on Sunday morning we went for a walk and saw this fishing place

.    The fish were definately biting - but we're not sure they had much choice!

Then it was off to Omote-sando for lunch.  This is a rather chic shopping street with tons of designer boutiques and French-style sidewalk cafes.

    After lunch, on the way to the Meiji-jingu shrine, we saw this peace march.  The girl at the front was very fond of posing for the camera!

There was a lot going on at the shrine this Sunday.  Roberta had been here before, but during the week it is very quiet.  This was a completely different kind of visit.

    Torii on the way to the shrine.

    The entrance to the shrine.  This shrine is dedicated to the Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken.

    Most people purify themselves at a special water trough before entering the shrine.  You are meant to pour the water from the ladle over both hands, then pour some into a cupped hand and rinse your mouth.

    The entrance to the shrine from the inside.

    The shrine itself.

    There was a wedding going on when we arrived and we saw this wonderfully stately procession going through the shrine.

A lot of the women and small children visiting the shrine were dressed in kimono.  We managed to get some photos of these charming little girls.

There was also an ikebana display.  Very beautiful flowers and elegant compositions.

There is a very interesting spectacle in Harajuku on Sunday afternoons.  A lot of Tokyo's Goths congregate there to socialise and (it seemed) to have their photos taken.  Most weren't really what we would call Goths but were some kind of goth-manga-pokemon hybrid!

Finally we stopped in briefly at Yasukuni-jinga and found this guardian statue.

    Tokyo from a bridge across the canal.