tokyo, what a great city

We headed out early for another big day in Tokyo, a city we were quickly falling in love with.  We started out by going to the Meiji Jingu temple, one of the larger Shinto temples in the middle of Tokyo. It is on a large piece of land and once you enter it, you forget you are in one of the largest cities in the world.

One of the Entrances to the whole complex.

This is what it looked like once you entered the complex - forest and nature.

The lead up to the temple was lined in wine barrels on one side and sake barrels on the other. They were given to the temple to christen it every year - our type of place.

The temple itself was modest but nice. While we were there a wedding was going one and we got to see a procession walk through the temple.

A funny thing that we saw around the temple was the donation of vegetables. Some were just small piles of vegetable, while others where huge monstrosities of vegetables made into boats.

After the temple we headed back to our favorite park for a picnic. The Temple complex was actually connected to the park, so all we had to do was look for the closest convenience store to pick up picnic supplies. I don't think we've said it yet, but convenience store food in Japan is really good and even locals eat there all the time. We fell in love with these little triangular sushi-esque things called onigiri, which are a popular on-the-go snack in Japan (we most often ate the tuna and mayo flavor, which was like tuna salad in rice and seaweed).

On our search for picnic supplies, we ran across a thrift store that had the complete wrong idea about what type of climate Chicago has.

With picnic supplies in hand we headed to the park.

 It was a big day in the park for animals and we saw all sorts of dog walking and even a few cat walkers.