Japan Thoughts from Lynette

We started our trip to Japan with 11 days in Tokyo.  The highlight was definitely TeamLab Planets.  This is an interactive, immersive art exhibit that I had to book a full month ahead of time.  It's hard to do justice to how cool this experience really was.  

We stayed in an airbnb in Asakusa and happened to be there during the biggest festival of the year - the Sanja Matsuri festival.  Large groups of people carry 100+ portable shrines around the city for two days and around 1.8 million people converge on this part of the city for lively celebrations.  

For Peyton, Tokyo was an opportunity to experience local wrestling practices.  Mark and Peyton covered the city thanks to a friend who introduced them to a number of different clubs.  The head coach at one practice was a silver medalist in the Olympics.  

In addition, we took walking tours to learn about the history and culture, roamed around shopping areas including one where fake food models are made for restaurants, went to the top of Tokyo Sky Tree for aerial city views, took a river cruise, and went to the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, the Salt and Tobacco Museum, and the Samurai Ninja Museum.  Oh, and school work too. Phew!  

Our final day in Tokyo, we went to Shibuya Crossing - the biggest street crossing in the world (up to 3,000 people at a time), roamed Takeshita Street, and walked to Shinjuku to see Godzilla.  The family challenge was to see who could capture the strangest Tokyo photo.  Peyton's blog captures some of these. This entry was taken on the wrong day, but would have been my personal favorite.  You can't tell from the picture that this man had a face painted white like a geisha and a nose like Corporal Klinger.  

    

And then...it was time to leave Tokyo for Kyoto.  We happily boarded the Shinkansen (bullet train) with our ekiben (bento boxes for the train).  

Kyoto was an amazing, beautiful city and had some of our family highlights.  We rented a kimono for Talia and spent the day wandering around the Kiyomizu-dera temple with Peyton as her personal photographer.  Talia was in absolute heaven and did not want to go back to normal life.  Seeing her so happy was a highlight for me. She has a post on this.  

We hit another high for both kids, with a visit to the Monkey Park.  They spent untold hours feeding monkeys and taking pictures. For LOTS of pictures and commentary, see Peyton's blog.  

After Kyoto, we took another bullet train to Hiroshima.  We spent the afternoon at the Peace Memorial Museum and Peace Memorial Park.

  

The next day, we took a ferry over to Miyajima, a small island where the torii looks like it's floating at high tide.  We had a great day hanging out with the deer, taking a gondola up the mountain, and hiking up and down the island.   

One final night in Osaka and then on to Italy!