Our first day in Tokyo, we decided to have a picnic in the park near our hotel. 
The garden is huge and beautiful. 
This is the Tawain pavilion. 
I have never seen trees like this before, with roots growing up out of the ground. 
The garden is a very old botanical garden. 
Amazing green spiders were everywhere. 
Eating our picnic in the sun. 
These snacks were actually delicious. 
Something like New York’s Times Square, this is an extremely busy shopping area.
I had never seen anything like this before. The lights are incredible.
There are shops on ground level, and more shops and restaurants on the upper levels as well. The signs hanging outside the building advertise where things are.
This is the famous scramble crosswalk seen in the film “Lost in Translation”. The photos do not do justice to how busy it was.
Inspired by a Lonley Planet walking tour, we headed for Asakusa. 
We stopped at a sweet shop and we don’t know exactly what we chose, but they were delicious. 
The guidebook walking tour instructions mentioned heading down an alley. 
The alley was difficult to find.
We ended up walking through several cemeteries. 
Which were serene
Hello Kitty traffic cones
Very busy streets. You can see the shops extend from the street up to the 7th and 8th floors.
This is one of the large malls near Shinjuku station.
A different multi-level shopping mall.
Hello Kitty.
The municipal building is free to take the elevator to the lookout on the 43rd floor.
Our new favourite store, Uniqlo.
The ominous Municipal building at night.
Mount Fuji in the distance at dusk.
A day trip from Kyoto, we headed to the Fushimi Inari shrine and the hike up Inari mountain. There are over 10,000 orange Torii ( gates ) along the trail which takes about 2 hours to hike.
Here is the not-to-scale map. Within 15 minutes we appeared to be half-way up the mountain. Getting to the top took much longer than expected.
Along the way, there are numerous shrines where people stopped and prayed, leaving miniature torii.
The path is lined with gates and lit the entire way.
It’s also very popular, although it was much busier near the bottom.
Here is one of the shrines with a fox fountain.
The gates are a mixture of old and new.
This is the shrine at the top of the mountain.
Here we are finally at the top. It’s hard to read, but the plaque says, “Top of the mountain”
In amongst the trees, the path got dark quickly but there were lights on the entire way. The trail is open 24 hours a day and we passed people heading up, even at night.
As we came back down the mountain, we had an incredible view of Kyoto below.
This is the shrine at the bottom, as we left to get on the train and head home.
