Night and Day

After breakfast today Mrs C wasn't feeling ship-shape so stayed for a snooze while Ms H and I went off to VR Tokyo, an amusement arcade with virtual headsets etc. There were various games such as car racing, flying, fighting etc, but when I came to do one with a warning "don't do if you are bad with heights", which I can be, I thought, oh come on, it's a game. But when I had the headset on, you had to walk along a plank between 2 very high buildings... dear oh dear... I almost took off the headset then I was almost petrified. Then I did fall off, to the ground, and stumbled in real life... boy was I glad to get off that. I'll take the advice next time...

Mrs C joined us by the end of it and we headed up to the Meiji Jingu Shrine which we thought was in a wide open park, but was actually full of trees, so we were shaded from the sun. Extra #1 photo 1 is of the decoration barrels of sake wine. Photo 2 is the view from our hotel breakfast room where you can see 4 levels of roads, all crossing over each other!  Photo 3 is of a building cladded with plant-life. And in photo 4, an lcd display on the subway train showing what to expect when you reach the next station... escalators, lifts, exits. This display changes for each stop... all the subways in Japan we've seen are also numbered so you can countdown until your stop without having to remember the name. Our 3 days unlimited pass was £10, great value! At 9pm when we got off our last train, there were about 6 staff aligned along each platform making sure people were safe. It is astonishing how many people they employ over here... in London''s underground you rarely see anyone! I do happen to love the subways here!

Anyway, we visited two places twice today, once in daylight then at night after dinner. In extra #2, the top 2 photos are of the Shibuya Crossing Intersection, which is supposedly the busiest intersection IN THE WORLD! When the green man goes, hundreds of people begin crossing all over the place, it gets full of people. Then there are the advertising video boards with audio cladded to the walls. It's quite a place!

In the bottom 2 photos there are views out to the Tokyo Tower, to the right of the Docomo Yoyogi Building which is modelled on New York's Empire State Building. These views were from the Metropolitan Government Building which lets you go tot he top for free and is the tall photo to the right, all lit up too!

And finally them main blip is a panorama of the Shibuya Crossing Intersection again, I loved it so much I blipped it twice!