Asia Mega Tour II - It's All About Photography

And yet you shall be spared having to wade through all the pictures...at least for now.

Let me start by saying that Tokyo on a Sunday is a freaking madhouse. Everyone is out, about, and around. Streets a filled with throngs of people. I think that Wife and I are both feeling quite overwhelmed by Tokyo. We are loners by nature and we are not really city folk either - there's a reason we moved from the ever more crowded Washington/Baltimore corridor to the relatively sparsely populated Albuquerque New Mexico. Now we've been to plenty of large cities and there cities that are large that we enjoy. We were very comfortable in Taipei. We enjoyed Kuala Lampur and Singapore. I adore Paris. But there is something about Tokyo that seems to take the city intensity to another level, something that we're not quite getting off on. Maybe it is because we're doing this at the end of a long trip. I don't know.

Our big activity of the day was a photographic workshop. This workshop was conducted by the same company that we used for our workshop in Kyoto. So we knew that it would be an intense experience with a lot of ideas thrown at us. We were not wrong.

As the workshop didn't start until 5 PM, we needed to do something during the day. But we didn't want to do so much that we would be exhausted by the time we went to the workshop. We had a late breakfast - McDonald's is our breakfast of choice in Japan. I think I mentioned in our Osaka post that you can get freshly scrambled eggs, sausage, potato thing (that actually tastes like potatoes!) and coffee for $4.50 which is half of what the hotel wants for its buffet of lukewarm food. Then we went to the Meiji Shrine -dedicated to the Emperor - and a garden in a park. Neither Wife nor I had much energy and to be honest neither place was all that exciting compared to other things we've seen this trip.

We knew we needed to rest so it was back to the hotel. We stopped for lunch at a German place of all things - It was actually very good! - and were able to get a solid two-hour rest in before we had to head out again. We had a third person with us for the photo workshop - a surgeon from Melbourne, Australia. We always enjoy these interactions with the people we meet at these tours and workshops.

The workshop was every bit as intense and informative as we had anticipated. We were in the Shibuya area of Tokyo which is one of the major high end districts. We had all kinds of experiences going not only through the crowded areas but also ducking into these alleys and parks that within minutes had you totally away from all the mass of humanity. We saw a lot of aspects of the city we would not have otherwise.

We didn't get back to the hotel until 8:30 PM and then we got some food and took it too the room. I took tons and tons of photos but a lot of them are going to be rejects. It will take a couple of days before I go through them and can get some up here on the blog. And on top of all that we have a six-hour food tour with the company that did our tour in Istanbul, Culinary Backstreets, so I doubt if there is going to be any energy left tomorrow for pictures either!

BTW, if you are not visiting Wife's new blog - http://gloandmikeabroad.blogspot.jp/ -  you are missing an entirely different take on our travels and some really, really great photography as well.