Gardens and Shrines

Today was our last full day in Japan and we did a lot of walking. :) In the morning we explored the Sensoji complex near our hotel.

This part of the complex is a Buddhist temple, which was neat to see.

In the same complex there was also a Shinto shrine, it survived World War II while most of the rest of the buildings had to be rebuilt after the bombings. It is interesting to see how the two religions coexist.

This is where you would ceremonially wash your hands, isn't the ceiling neat? :)

For lunch, we ate at a place in Asakusa that is well known for their tempura. We ate a bit early so there wasn't much of a line, but later in the day it was really busy. Turns out the only dish they had that wasn't seafood was eggplant, so Robby got to have eggplant. He actually found it to be pretty good.

We went to the imperial palace complex in the afternoon. The East Gardens are open to the public on certain days, but most of the area is where the imperial family lives. This is one of the entrances to the East Gardens.

This is one of three remaining guard houses from early on when they used samurai to guard the palace.

This was a storage area and for defense of the grounds. It said that before the city was built up, you could see Mt. Fuji from this building.

The walls and foundations were huge! The stones they used are pretty impressive.

There was a beautiful garden that was designed in the Edo period (1600s to mid 1800s) but it burned down like everything else seems to at least once in Tokyo. They found the original plans for the garden and were able to rebuild it. The irises were in bloom.

This bridge and the building behind it are part of the imperial residence so we could only take pictures from a distance. 

After we dragged ourselves back to the hotel, we had delicious tonkatsu for dinner. It is breaded and fried pork, so yummy. Then we got green tea ice cream, came back to the hotel and got our luggage mostly ready for the flight to Thailand tomorrow.