A Series Of International Incidents: The Anguished Arrival*

After living here for nearly three years, my mom came to visit! I met her at the train station in Tokyo (she took the train from the airport), with all her luggage in tow:

Most of the luggage was actually exotic food like long-grain rice, various varieties of Twizzlers, and Kosher dill pickles from the US.  There was also a single and inexplicable can of tunafish. We managed to man(woman?)handle it all over to the apartment before trying to find an apparently now-defunct Thai restaurant I'd selected on the internet as a dinner destination.  That not being in existence, we hit the foreign foods market, where Lee and I generally buy several hundred ounces of peanut butter in enormous tubs because it is literally five times less expensive there than in our local stores. They no longer sell the big peanut butter jugs. I bought granola bars, oatmeal, and otherwise unobtainable snacks like Cheetos anyway. At least our long-time favorite Mexican restaurant nearby was open, and I for one got a nice raspberry margarita to cap off the day.

The next day we did some sightseeing. We headed off to Meiji Shrine first off. On our way to the shrine, we passed some giant gates:

And came upon a garden. This garden has a very old well.

 

After walking through the nice open paths through the woods, we found the shrine itself. This shrine was made in the early 1900s, rebuilt after WWII, and is popular for weddings now. It's well-known because people like Hillary Clinton have visited in more recent times. Part of the shrine itself:

We managed to exit the shrine at probably the furthest possible location from any subway stations, and had to do some walking before getting underway towards our dinner reservation, a Brazilian steakhouse, which in Japan are always good for all-you-can-drink in addition to all-you-can-eat.  Afterwards we checked out Akihabara at night to see the area, though quite a few businesses were keeping their signs off in order to conserve electricity. It was still fun!

There are more pictures up at Flickr, though we took a lot fewer pictures than I'd thought. Next up, we went to the Imperial Garden and took a cheesy haunted tour of Tokyo.

*Arrival not particularly anguished - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.