Tokyo!

We are on a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, travelling with our friends Greg and Lynn.   This is actually my fifth trip to Tokyo in the last 11 years; all my previous trips predate this blog.   As you might infer from the frequency of my trips, I love the city of Tokyo.   So much so, that in my four previous trips, I have never gone outside of Tokyo and the immediate vicinity.   We are staying in a neighborhood called Nakano in an rented apartment.
It's really almost impossible to describe Tokyo in a few paragraphs.   It is an astonishing city, like no other in the world that I know of.  What is most impressive is the sheer size of the city and  the multitude of contrasts within it.  There are neighborhoods with narrow little streets and two to three story houses and Buddhist temples, and there are neighborhoods with nothing but giant glitzy skyscrapers and high end shopping malls.  The city is constantly in motion, served by an extensive subway and train system.  There are always crowds of people going somewhere.  Yet people are unfailingly friendly and polite.   It is the most futuristic city in the world, while at the same time clinging to the many ancient patterns of living.

We have been going to different areas of the city each day.  Our first day started at Asakusa, an area featuring a lot of temples and a feeling of old Tokyo.
The path to the main temple:

A small restaurant:

There are gardens and ponds

Old and new architecture

From there we went to the Ginza area, home of high end shopping and flamboyant retail architecture.
We visited a basement food hall, which featured every kind of gourmet food from all over the world, in displays which cried out to be photographed.  But no photos were allowed.   It was an an astonishing display of conspicuous consumption.   And then there are buildings like these.

This building looks curved  but it actually has a flat surface.

Pearl shop

And the stunning Tokyo International Forum:

After that, it was back to our home neighborhood, where there are one thousand nine hundred restaurants listed on trip advisor.    The food is wonderful, to say the least, although the process of ordering can be complicated when the staff doesn't speak English, and we don't speak Japanese.   But even if you don't get what you thought you were going to get, it is usually very good.