Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu Shrine

Well, it's only 2:30 p.m. here, but I've already walked 6 miles...yikes!  I started the morning a little later today, having learned my lesson about nothing opening before 8 yesterday, and I headed to a coffee shop where I was able to have my first cup of hot black coffee since I got here.  It was fantastic.  They call it American Coffee, I learned, and you have to specify that you don't want it iced.  After I finished my coffee, I headed off to Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu Shrine, which is just north of Shibuya.  Google maps told me that it would be about 3 kilometers one way, and that there wasn't a direct route.  Since there doesn't appear to be any street names here, I figured I would just tryto keep heading Southeast until I saw trees.  I ended up taking a path that led me through a bunch of residential neighborhoods, which seemed pretty upscale.  I also passed a ton of embassies, including Bulgaria, which had a bunch of tough looking Bulgarians standing out front. I ended up finding the West entrance to the park, which was about a kilometer further south than I wanted to be.  But, at least I had found it!

 

 As I was walking, I kept stumbling on tree branches.  At first I couldn't figure out why there were so many everywhere, and then I remembered: Typhoon!  There were 110 mile an hour winds last night, so I guess it makes sense that a few tree branches were down.  Mike and I slept through the whole thing...thanks to our jet lag.

 Here's a guy with a chain saw chopping up some tree limbs.  As you can see, there are leaves everywhere.

 I came to a sign that said "Bird Sanctuary", and you could hear why.  Giant black birds that sort of looked like a more exotic version of a crow were everywhere.  They were so noisy! And it seemed like they were fighting a lot.  They also seemed to have no fear of people, as a few got pretty close to me.

 I kept walking through the park, looking for a place to sit, but everything was flooded from the typhoon, so I decided to press on and look for the Shrine, which was supposed to be in the same general area. 

 I eventually realized that they were not connected, and that I would have to exit the park to enter the Shrine.  So, in the picture below, I had come into the park on the bottom left of the dark green area, walked in the loop around the top, and then come back down to the bottom right of the dark green area, which was Harajuku.  I wanted to go up to the light green area.

 After standing around for awhile, feeling dumb, I spotted this group of tourists.  This was when I developed my new motto: When in doubt, follow the tourists.

 They brought me to the entrance of the Shrine, which had a gate called a Torii.  This was one of many.

 Torii close up:

 Then we headed down a long path.  I still wasn't 100% sure where I was, or if I was following the right tourists (haha), but I kept going.

 I passed some people sweeping up the debris from the storm on the way, the brooms they were using were literally one big stick with a bunch of little sticks attached to the bottom.

 I crossed over this stream, which was beautiful.  I later found out that this was coming from the iris garden.

 View of the bridge:

 Stream again:

 We finally got to a Welcome Center.  There still wasn't anything that indicated I was at the Shrine (at least not in English), so I headed into the welcome center, and found an ice cream and cold beverage stand.  It's about 85 degrees here and extremely humid, so I was ready for something cold and refreshing!  The ice cream was green tea flavored, so I got a green tea to go with it.

 After I finished this and cooled off a little, I saw a bus of what looked like Spaniards arrive.  I followed them and found the path to the Shrine.  The path was lined with all sorts of interesting things, including barrels of sake wrapped in straw.  Not sure if you can read below, but basically, every year every sake brewery sends a barrel in honor of the emperor:

 Apparently Emperor Meiji was very open to other cultures and improving peace between other nations, and one of the things he liked to do to celebrate this was drink red wine.  So, on the other side of the path from the sake, they had a bunch of wine, donated from all over the world in honor of the emperor.

 Next I found the biggest Torii, which is called the Ichi no Torii.  At 36 feet, it's Japan's biggest Torii. It was built from 1,600 year old cypress trees....pretty cool!

 Finally, I spotted the Shrine!

 As I found out yesterday, when you enter a shrine, you are expected to wash your hands and rinse out your mouth.  Luckily, there was a sign explaining it in English, which said you were to do your left hand first, then your right, then you were supposed to slurp water out of your left hand, then you were supposed to spit that water out in the rocks below your feet, then you were supposed to rinse your left hand again. Below is just one of many stations to do so. 

 Here is the entrance to the Shrine:

 The shrine is the green roofed building in the back, which is surrounded by a courtyard. There are many other buildings, too.

 If you were a part of this group, you were able to go through the shrine.  Unfortunately, I stuck out like a sore thumb, and they didn't let me in...I tried though!

 I was glad I didn't get in, because I was able to see this traditional Shinto wedding processional. 

 Here's the bride and groom.

Here's a bunch of votive tablets, or wooden tablets that you can purchase for 500 yen, and write your prayers on.  You then hang them up around the base of this tree.   The keepers of the shrine transcribe them to the spirits every day, so all of those were just from today! I looked at some of them, and there were some in English, some in French and Spanish, and a lot in Japanese.  The English ones were all asking for their parents to have long, healthy lives, or to find true love.  I thought both were kind of sweet!  I still felt guilty after my 45 dollar lunch yesterday though, so I didn't spring for one.  I'm sure we'll be back though!

 This type of wall bordered the entire complex:

 Here's a close-up of the hand and mouth washing stations:

 A view of the entrance:

 A view of the tree with all of the votives below it:

 These lights were hung everywhere.  I thought they were pretty cool looking, I bet it looks really cool at night when they are all lit up! :

 These were the other two trees in the courtyard.  I have no idea what the rope hanging between the two of them is, but it looked pretty cool.

 I headed out of the temple after hanging out for about an hour.  There were a lot of benches to sit at, where you could relax and take it all in.  This has been my favorite thing to do so far in Tokyo.  The streets can be really busy and really intimidating, so it was nice to sit and clear my head.  Also, at most tourist places no one cares if you're white and blonde...the same can't be said about the streets.  I can't believe how many people on the streets stare at me.  It's not really that it's creepy or anything, I'm just not used to it.  I've been told that they just don't usually see a blonde person, which makes sense, because I saw my first fellow blonde today, at the shrine.  There are also very few white people here, so I guess I'm just different!
The path lining the exit of the shrine had all of these boards up, detailing the history of the shrine.  It was pretty cool to learn about, and I was so relieved that they had english on them!  

 There are 170,000 trees of 245 different species on Shrine grounds, all of which were donated by people to pay their respects of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken.

 They outlined what each leader of each country did when they heard that Emperor Meiji died.  Here's Taft!  USA! USA!  Let's be glad he didn't do what some leaders did, which was commit suicide via sword to honor the Emperor. Yikes.

 Here's where things get sad, and I HOPE that when Mike gets home he can figure this out! On the shrine grounds is an Iris garden, which only blooms during two weeks in June...when I just so happened to be there! I paid 500 yen to get in, and took 35 pictures, only to later find out that for some reason these pictures are "unreadable files".  So, either our camera or memory card is broken, or Empress Shoken didn't want me sharing pictures of her Iris garden.  Here are the pictures that I did get, this was the path heading to the garden:

 Here was a tea house, that wasn't open.

 Here's my last picture.  Below these manicured shrubs is a fishing pond that the emperor and empress frequently visited.  It was filled with the biggest coy fish I have ever seen.  People must feed them, because as soon as I stepped to the end of the dock, they all swarmed around me.  It was kind of creepy.  Then, to the right of this picture, was another path that led to the iris garden.  I am SO bummed that the pictures didn't work from this, as it was incredibly beautiful.  There are 1500 blooms of white and different shades of purple.  All of the irises are planted in about 6 inches of water.  This water goes to the fish pond, which goes to that stream that I took pictures of in the very beginning.  At the end of the iris path, there is another path that leads to a well. It was the coolest thing ever! Water just sprung up naturally from the ground, and there was a security guard there, helping people get down to wash their hands in the water.  The water was incredibly clear and very cold.  It felt so good to wash my hands in the cold water after trekking all over in the humidity. I took pictures of that, too, but haven't had luck with those either. 

After I was done with the garden, I headed back to the welcome center and enjoyed a bowl of udon noodles, and about 7 glasses of water (luckily, water was free).  I can't believe how sweaty you get here! It's so humid, so I guess it makes sense.  Anyways, then I had to find my way home.  I ended up taking about the longest way possible.  I followed my map, and ended up in Yoyogi, which seemed cool, but I wasn't exactly sure how to get home from there.  I stood on a street corner, trying to figure out which way was north, when saw two guys that looked like they might be American heading down the street to my right.  I crossed my fingers that they were heading to Shinjuku, since that's a huge tourist spot, and followed them.  Luckily, I was right, and they led me right to the street I needed to get home, without even realizing it! I ended up walking an extra 2 kilometers then I needed to, but at least I got home.  As I got closer, my feet hurt SO BAD.  I finally got home, after an hour long walk, and have been enjoying the air conditioning and a Sapporo beer ever since.
One funny thing: I turned the TV on, and they have a "ABC News Flood", where they play a news clip in English, then, play it with Japanese subtitles, then with a japanese person talking over it with english subtitles.  The keyword today is "herding cats", because Obama said it in a speech today.  It's hilarious, because evidently they don't have phrase here.  So they have a 2 minute explanation of what herding cats means.  Made me smile! 
Our boxes from home came today, so I'm going to work on unpacking those until Mike gets home.  Hopefully he can figure out the camera! I'm not marrying someone who worked on the Geek Squad for nothing... ha! Kidding...kind of. :-)