Tokyo - under my umbrella

Life would be really boring if there were no surprises related to the weather forecast. Thanks to the Typhoon Krovanh (which is a Cambodian word for a kind of tree) visiting Tokyo turned out to be a kind of extreme sport. After arriving from Kawaguchiko, Daniel and I were full of hope for a better weather. Well, actually I was looking for the sun, while Daniel was complaining how dirty, smelly and nasty the capital of Japan is when you compare it to Nagoya. In those more or less optimistic moods, we've reached a building of the Tokyo City Hall, which has 2 towers and 48 floors. We've picked the North Tower to see the panoramic view of Tokyo in the fog, so the elevator took us to the 45th floor. The other cool things about that building were 2 great tourist information offices - the 1st one had all the information concerning every region of Japan and the 2nd one was devoted to Tokyo only. What's more, it was the day of elections - we were in the right place in the right time.

Our hostel was located in Asakusa, which was considered to be the main entertainment district of Tokyo in the past. Probably, its most characteristic monument used to be Senso-ji the Buddhist temple. Right now, I would rather say that it's much more difficult not to notice the advertisement of Asahi beer, which is supposed to look like a giant drop of beer but it also resembles a golden piece of sh...

On Sunday morning, when it started raining even more heavily, Daniel and I made a deal - what is more popular in Japan: Starbucks or Mister Donut. Luckily, in that moment MrD won (even though I was in favour of *$ and we had a morning coffee with super tasty green tea donuts! Later it turned out that there are more *$ around the city but since then I'm always in favour of MrD!

How is it possible, that in the city where every person recycles garbage, almost every person rides a bicycle or metro instead of a car, everything is surrounded by huge advertisements filled with power consuming lights???

I have to confess, in my opinion Tokyo is a really strange place. I'm able to understand why did they put a robot called Gundam on an artificial island - this robot is something very important for Japanese culture and people all over Japan are mad about him. On the days when the tyhpoons are not expected, the robot even moves and does all those things that make him a true robot. Meanwhile, I can't find any reasonable explanation for the rest of crazy stuff.

What I mean by "crazy stuff" is a copy, erected in the year 2000, of the Statue of Liberty that has been standing in the middle of the New York Harbour starting from over 100 years before I was born until now. It also seems that it's not the only replica of the statue in Japan. The situation gets even more weird when the most famous bridge of Tokyo - the Rainbow Bridge - partly disappears in the fog and pretends to be the Brooklyn Bridge. In one of the movies Woody Allen said that "the true New Yorker secretly believes that anyone living anywhere else than New York must be kidding". The Statue of Liberty in Tokyo is a good Japanese joke then!

This post was not based on the pictures that I took in Tokyo, but on the pictures of me taken in Tokyo by DanielSan. Hey! It's my blog, I also want to appear here from time to time... :)

(This is one of over 30 posts, which I accidentally deleted one day in January. Luckily, I was able to recover them thanks to the backup done by DanielSan! It's a pity that the comments are gone but someting is better than nothing.)