Dan Is Awesome

Another 8am morning, a morning tour of downtown Japan and then lurking around planned in the evening. The tour started at Tokyo Tower, and thankfully the weather was fairly decent. The tower is a radio and TV tower, but at 333 meters tall it really gives a great view of the downtown wards. They’re currently constructing a new tower called Skytower that is almost twice as tall.

Full Pano Link (slightly massive (~15mb))

After the tower, we headed over to the Imperial Palace, where the Emperor lives. You can’t go in the palace, but apparently you can work in the Emperor’s garden for 4 days (paying all expenses during those days), and then you can meet him for about 20 seconds. The wait list for Japanese citizens is over 2 years, but for foreigners it is only 6 months. Maybe not the ideal vacation, but you could say you met the Emperor.

Following the slightly boring palace, we wandered around some Shinto temple for a bit, then took a ferry down Tokyo harbor. Easily the best 15 bucks we spent that day. Tokyo harbor gives you a nice view of the city, as well as the array of bridges that cross it. Every bridge is a different color and of constructed in a different style, so it was pretty cool as far as bridges go.

So our final day in Tokyo went pretty well. Tokyo is a nice city, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as advanced as people build it up to be. It’s got good trains (all of Japan does) and some really unique tech spots, but other than that it’s just a very, very big city.