Tokyo Trip / 2013.02 / Ikebukuro and Meiji Jingu

We started our second day of our trip with lots of sunshine. It was not hot, but just warm enough so that we don’t need our jackets. Here is a photo of the front entrance of the apartment we stayed at.

On our way to the Ikebukuro Station, we saw these statues at a nearby jinja (神社). Being a traveler, you can expect me to take photos of almost everything :)

As we walked further towards the station, we found another jinja.

We didn’t stay in Tokyo long enough to see what kind of celebrations these jinjas would have. Seeing the different celebrations in Japan is something I would love to do in my lifetime :)

We happened to be visiting Tokyo during golden week. There were lots of sales and department stores were busy. The sales are pretty good also. 20 to 30% discounts are pretty common.

Here we are finally getting close to the station. A normally 7-minute walk turned into a 30-minute journey as we were busy taking photos of this and that.

Of course, that didn’t stop even after we got onto the platform. As mentioned in my previous post, we rented a 3G pocket wifi and that was very handy to upload photos directly from my iPhone. These photos from my camera, however, had to wait until now before I have time to process and upload them.

It didn’t take long for us to get from Ikebukuro Station to Harajuku Station. Harajuku Station is close to both Takeshita Dori and Meiji Jingu Shrine. We are going to visit Meiji Jingu Shrine on this particular day.

I wish we have trains like this in Vancouver. So ultra convenient here in Tokyo!

It was on Saturday and there were lots of people out and about early in the morning.

Spring Festival!

It has been quite a number of years since I visited Meiji Jingu Shrine. The first time I visited Tokyo was in 2003 and a friend in Japan showed me around. It was also the last time I visited Meiji Jingu Shrine and somehow 10 years passed by before I step foot here again. Kind of scary when you think about how time flies.