Hey guys! Thank you so much for the sweet birthday wishes :] It really means a lot. My birthday was great. It was nice spending time with loved ones and eating good food. Brian bought me a BA book by the Monkees called the Monkees Go Mod :] I will be getting to all of your comments from the past few weeks shortly, promise! I missed all of you so much. It is so weird being out of the blogging loop for awhile. There is so much to catch up on!! It is just so hard getting back in to the groove of things.
Anywho, let me show you a bit of my trip. I plan to break it up in chunks. I took soooo many pictures. To view them all click on one of the images below and you can view the photos I have uploaded thus far - I only have the first 3 days up - eeep! Let's get started... (there are a ton of pics so just feel free to breeze through them fast or not at all, haha)
Headed to Japan
On my 13 hour plane ride I didn't sleep in order to avoid jet lag once I arrived. The view from my window was so pretty. Above is an image I took while we flew over Alaska, and below is of the ocean once we were a half an hour from Japan.
Tokyo - Day one
We started our day just outside Asakusa to visit the new Sky Tree. It is the tallest tower in the world and will open to the public this summer.
We did a ton of walking this day (of course I didn't bring my tennis shoes :-/). After sky tree we headed on over to Asakusa to check out the shopping and temples. It is so pretty there.
For lunch we had one of my favorite dishes - shrimp TEMPURA!! Yummm. It came with vegetable tempura too but I ate that up quickly and forgot to take the picture half way through, whoops. I could probably eat tempura, ramen, and sushi every single day.
After Asakusa we headed to Ueno park. Uneo has a beautiful park full of shrines, a kiddy park, zoo, and food stalls.
It was a wee bit too cold this spring so the Sakuras (cherry blossoms) were late to bloom. Thankfully I spotted a few.
Below is a Takoyaki stand. Basically they are dough balls with octopus in them. Everyone over there loves them. I was too afraid to try them since I was afraid they would be too chewy (can't handle strange textures).
These are ume blossoms (plum blossoms) similar to sakuras - but they bloom earlier and have a pinker color to them.
After the park at Ueno we walked around the city. They have some great little shops in the area. I am saving the toy shops I stumbled upon for
Toy Army Tuesday, so stay tuned. After Ueno we headed to Akihabara - aka - electric town. This part of Tokyo has all the gadgets and technology.
I know I wrote a little bit about it before, but while we were here we went to a maid cafe. At maid cafe's the women dress in little maid costumes and cast spells on the cutesy drinks and food you order. They also lip sync and dance throughout your stay. You can also pay to take photos and play games with them. It is pretty strange. I wish my scanner worked so I could upload my photo of my friend Mike and I with one of the maids from the cafe.
So...I plan to write about each day (probably combining a few in one) for the next few days and finish by the end of next week. After that I will get back on a regular schedule - promise!
Have a lovely weekend everyone :]
