This is what we did for our first full day in Tokyo. We arrived on New Year's, which is a big holiday here. The New Year's celebrations last for several days. These pictures were taken at the Asakusa Shrine, a Shinto shrine that's 3 subway stops from our apartment. The first picture shows the Thunder Gate, the entranceway to the shrine. The entrance is lined with stalls selling a variety of goods, including kimonos, woodblock prints, rice cracker snacks, and toys. The second picture shows the signs for these stalls and you can get a sense of how crowded it was, although the pictures really don't do it justice.

Here are pictures of me at the shrine. If you think of the shrine on an axis, the north-south is lined with the stalls selling souvenirs and the east-west has food stalls. The picture of me with sunglasses on shows the food stalls behind me. They have all kinds of goodies for sale, like takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakitori, and corn on the cob. Takoyaki are octopus balls- round fritters made with octopus. I love takoyaki, but I haven't had any yet. Osaka is well-known for its takoyaki. Okonomiyaki is sometimes referred to as Japanese pizza or Japanese pancakes. It really tastes like neither. It's made with a batter of cabbage and egg, and then topped with a variety of items. If you get it at a restaurant you can tell the chef what you want on it. Okonomiyaki literally means "as you like it." At the stalls you basically get pork and veggies, or sometimes pork and veggies topped with an egg. It's covered with a brown sauce and sometimes mayonnaise. Yakitori are skewers, normally with chicken, but we saw fish, octopus, and vegetables.