Date night in Tokyo (April 11th and 12th)

Chad and I headed out to Tokyo for the night and left Charles and Arwen in charge of the kids.  We had a great room at the Tokyo Hilton and it was a lot of fun to see the city at night - I could not believe the number of people out - way more than late night in Seattle, but maybe it depends on what district you're in.  The next day we toured one of the city's largest garden parks and then returned back to Yokosuka in the afternoon on the green car.

The view from our room

streets of Tokyo - Saturday night

reminds of me New York

A few more shots from the hotel (there was a window at the end of the hall with a great view)

The largest city in the world extends into the horizon as far as you see

 

This birdie really wanted Chad's pastry!

Lots of spring flowers to see in the gardens

MEGA track

Tristan got some new tracks and I put myself up to the engineering challenge of trying to use every track we owned.  This took me at least an hour but I think it turned out pretty awesome.  And I believe there was only one or two tracks left.

Easter in Tokyo (Apr 5th)

Easter was a day of sight-seeing in Tokyo for us.  The rain certainly doesn't seem to deter the Japanese and it was a sea of umbrellas wherever we went.  We started our tour in Harajuku, a shopping district aimed mostly at teens and young adults. 

This pedestrian only street had many shopping stalls but it was so crowded that it was hard to stop and look at anything.

We made our way over to Togo shrine and walked through the garden.

We made it to the shrine where there was supposed to be a flea market but apparently our old guidebook was too outdated on that information.

We then headed back to the train station and took it across Tokyo to Ueno park, home of hundreds of cherry trees and the Ueno zoo.   After eating at an Indian restaurant along the nearby shopping alley, we headed into the park.

We started out our walk towards the temple and boat pond.

A certain type of cherry tree was very vibrant in color.

Many of the cherry trees were starting to drop their blossoms already.

We walked around the boat pond thinking that today was not so great of a day to take a paddle boat ride.

Next we went to Ueno zoo

T and I went on the little zoo monorail - he got to sit up front!

photo-op

The pandas were pacing the whole time we saw them - it seems they were not so happy about the rain

We saw a large brown bear scratching his back on the wall

A pagoda in the zoo

We then headed back out into the park and got some dinner at the food stands down by the pond.  All the lanterns started lighting up for the cherry festival, and we saw many more cherry festival picnicers.  This practice, which I mentioned in my earlier post, is called Hanami.

On the train ride home - Abby cuddles her new panda bear.

The boys play on their electronics.