Tokyo - day 2 and our last...

Not wanting to miss a moment, we were up and going early again. We decided to visit the wildlife refuge south of the city center. We arrived an hour before it opens, so we walked down to the Tsukiji fish market. We were too late to see the tuna auction and the tour (plus you had to sign up in advance I think) but we did walk through the parts we could. It is an amazing and very busy place and after visiting I think it would be really cool to see the auction! We need to remember that for our next trip!






We went back and toured the wildlife refuge. It has some historical significance (We participated in a historical self-paced audio tour.), but there was not a great deal of wildlife. We then made our way back to the train station and headed for Meiji-jingu. The shrine is off of a very vibrant shopping area. Finding the shrine was a bit of a challenge, but we enjoyed walking through the shopping area and lunching in another authentic Japanese restaurant. I ordered pork and thought it would be some sort of pork cutlet, but it was more like boiled bacon. Nice atmosphere there.







Then, it was off the the shrine. We found it on the other side of the train station. It is set in a huge forest - always so deceiving that there are such huge expanses of green in this city! It was getting late so we didn't have a lot of time (We needed to find Internet access to check-in for our return flight and I still had shopping I needed to do.) The shrine was very impressive. again, I didn't hardly get time to look at much of it. It appears that this is the place to get married. We saw three different weddings in different stages taking place with tourists just mixed in and taking pictures along with their photographers. Very beautiful, and I'm sure full of spiritual meaning for them as well. I plan to read up on the significance of a lot that we saw!



After completing a little more shopping and checking-ing for the flight, (and Shrined and templed out for the day), we decided to visit Bayside. However, darkness was falling so we weren't able to get a real strong feeling for the area. We took the monorail train and stopped in what appeared to be the heart of it. We walked around and saw some of the shopping, stopped and had a beer and then headed back to the center of town to start making our way back. For our perspective, it appears that there isn't a lot of activity in the evenings there. We did have a great view back across the water.

We found ourselves back in the center of town right at rush hour so we had to wait for room on a train, but we made our way back to Yoshio sad that our adventure was coming to an end.