When Travel Bugs Bite: Asakusa--the Old and New Tokyo Rolled into One

Why is it that places of worship often have a huge shopping street leading towards it? It's not just Nakamise St. on the way to Senso-ji (Asakusa Kannon Temple). Even going as far back as biblical times, there are always vendors by temples and churches. I'm sure there is a study somewhere as to why.

Either way, my first view of Senso-ji is not at its busiest. After checking into Kamogaway Ryokan, James and I went in search of food. But since we were so close to the temple, we had decided to take the opportunity to check out the temple without the crowds and boy was I glad we did. Here are some images we captured of the temple at night.

After the temple that evening, we found a non-memorable noodle shop (most likely why I don't have any pictures of it. We pretty much just headed to the ryokan after eating. My feet were already killing me after all and I could use a decent night's sleep.

The next day was a flurry of packing and making sure we had everything. I confirmed with Kamogawa that we can leave our huge backpacks in the ryokan until around three or four PM that day so that we can walk around Asakusa unhindered by our luggage. Strange as this may sound, our first stop during this time actually wasn't the shopping streets of Nakamise. Rather, James and I went down some different streets in order to check out some of the architecture of the old Tokyo. Here are some that we found:

Okay, so this is not quite old Tokyo, but this is where we had breakfast to fortify ourselves for our long walk around town.

I unfortunately forgot the name of this tower in Asakusa

Anway, after looking about on the older houses, we finally headed for the streets of Nakamise. I would have let the pictures describe the utter business of this street even on a weekday, but I was so distracted by the possibility of shopping, that I forgot all about my camera during our several walks down the street! I did remember to take pictures of Senso-ji again though, in the morning. And here they are:

There was a huge cauldron at the front of the temple where people lit incense and then waved the smoke towards themselves.

Okay, back to shopping and food. From tacky souvenirs to beautiful kimonos, Nakamise has everything an American tourist would want to bring home. I don't have pictures of the street and the vendors but I do, however, have some pictures of the food that we ate.

TAKOYAKI!!

This is our mid morning snack :)

Even James tried it!!

Strangely enough while we were eating takoyaki, we were approached by a couple of older Japanese men. One was a very philosophical guy who engaged me and James on a discussion as to why Asian women seem to marry Western (white) men while Western women generally don't marry Asian men. More topics came up until we finally had to leave...but not before we were stopped by another guy who was already pretty drunk. He kept saying "biking" while referring to James and even made some sort of hand motion which at first I thought referred to a guy riding a bike.

But no. He meant "Viking." My guess was he was referring to James's 5 o'clock shadow...that was a bit more than a shadow by now...

Anyway, after that, James convinced me to try the Miami Garden restaurant as they served pizza and he was a bit down on seafood at the moment after all the fish we had been eating. Here are pictures of what we ate:

The Margherita pizza

Curry rice soup

But that's not the end. Even though it's cold, I just had to try the green tea frozen yogurt. We found a stand in Nakamise street that sold various flavors. I didn't take a pictures of what James got (because really, once you've seen one vanilla frozen yogurt, you've seen them all), but I did take a picture of mine :)

Well, after a day of shopping and eating, we went back to Kamogawa ryokan. They have a coffee shop too! We decided to have some warm tea and coffee before finally heading out to the airport. The coffee shop was okay, but like a lot of eating places in Japan, smoking was allowed so we didn't stay too long. I did however, take more pictures of the Kamogawa Ryokan.