Japan Bringing in the New Year!
So I'll be honest I haven't been updating as much as I'd like here so here goes a rather long post. I have been so busy running around that I just haven't had a ton of time for this. I'll try to do better in Osaka but we will see how that goes. But I will try to post at least once more before Jan 15 when I'm home.
Shrines at Christmas
So I spent Christmas mostly alone and took a really long walk to clear my head and I really actually enjoyed that more than I would've thought. I felt honestly drawn to this little shrine as well, I was walking and I had a route that would take m pas a few parks on my way to my favorite Shibuya Crossing and then I looked down the street to my right (the below first image) and the light coming down the street, I just couldn't look away and I decided yea lets just go down that way and so long as I'm somewhat heading in the right direction I'll end up at Shibuya at some point. And then I was walking down this sunset boulevard I discovered and I stopped to look at my phone for directions and the above shrine just was directly in front of me and I stopped for a while. Walked around, looked at the little shrines, climbed a small mound to see a shrine at the top, and then went on my way. It was comfortingly more spiritual than I usually am.
So the above pictures, from left to right, are the pretty street that drew me in on Christmas, the Hachiko statue, a pretty building I liked, and My FIRST PANDA!
The Hachiko statue is a tribute to a dog that would come to the train station Every day to meet his owner and then one day the owner died and the dog kept coming to the station in tragic hope until the dog died as well. They did a really great movie on it as well and the dog captured the heart of the Japanese people.
The panda was on December 27 when I went to the zoo! The zoo just a week or two ago released its new baby panda to be seen by the public. You can only view the baby until noon and through a lottery system that is truly random. I wasn't so lucky but I'm going to try again when I'm back in Tokyo on the 12. I also just went to see the adult panda's too because I've actually never seen a panda before in my life. I also found out that I'm growing finally to the point of really disliking zoos, seeing animals in captivity like that really makes me sad. However I do see the educational purpose for children to see wild animals in their lives and that a lot of zoos participate in like wildlife programs and rescue and more than just displaying animals so I'm conflicted. For a panda though, i will go to the zoo.. we even got to watch him eat!
New Years!
I spent new years with some friends, one Bella from Australia who I met in my hostel and the other Shota who is Japanese and from Tokyo but I met him on my exchange in Thailand. We had a really good time and saw the shrines and then went to Shibuya Square for the count down. It was crazy packed but I had a blast.
One thing for me is that the date line is somewhere in the ocean between Japan and Portland (Australia gets it before Japan). But That means that this side of the world is the first to pass into the new year and Portland is a whopping 17 hours behind and in the middle is a bunch of ocean and very few people compared to the large continental land masses. So usually I'm one of the last people on the planet to celebrate and this year I was one of the first! I was celebrating new years at 7am in the morning in Portland. By the time they were celebrating the new year it was 5pm the next day for me and I was on my way to dinner after watching the fantastic new year sunset in the photos below. We saw the sunset on the 45th floor of the Government Metropolitan Building which has a free observatory. We were in the north tower and you can see more clearly in the right photo that we were able to see Mt. Fuji in the distance. You can only kinda see it in the photo to the left but it was beautiful and a great way to start off the new year!
Some photos of ramen I've been eating here, I thought I was taking more photos of food here... My bad.
I'll do another post either tonight or tomorrow about the cafe's I've been to here :)