Today was the last day in Tokyo and the last day of 2012. I think those two things go pretty well together.<\/p>\n
Being that the start of a New Year is a religious holiday here in Japan, many of the government buildings (actually all of them we tried to visit) were closed. That didn’t stop us from walking around and around the outside of them, taking pictures and gawking with the rest of the Japanese population that decided to spend their holiday in Tokyo. The capitol of Japan was pretty neat looking. Apparently if it had been open, anyone is allowed to go inside and watch live legislation in progress … Something for next time!<\/p>\n
We took today at a little slower pace. Spent sometime just enjoying how beautiful Tokyo really is. Even took a nice break at a park not far from the Imperial Palace (which was, of course, closed for the New Year).<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I realized that the Shinkansen trips we’re going to be taking over the last part of the trip are about double the cost of what I had originally calculated. Transportation via train is very common in Japan, but if you want to do it fast, (we’re talking 500 miles in about 4 hours) it’s gonna cost. Regardless, I’m looking VERY forward to riding the “most used railway in the world” tomorrow. The Shinkansen line we will be riding on (T\u014dkaid\u014d\u00a0Shinkansen\u00a0 has transported over 4.9 billion people in its 49 year history with no fatalities or serious injury due to train derailment or collision! Now that’s perfection to make even perfect people jealous! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
About to head out of the hotel towards Tokyo Tower which is the tallest self-supporting steel structure in the world, beating the Eiffel Tower by a dozen meters–sorry mom! They have a New Year’s Eve celebration at a temple near there that looks pretty cool on YouTube. I’m hoping it’s a yearly thing.<\/p>\n
Happy New Year’s Eve to all my readers\u00a0stateside.\u00a0 Let me be the first to wish you a happy new year, as by the time the clock strikes midnight for you, I’ll be flying (not literally, just figuratively) on a Shinkansen N700 towards Kyoto!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was the last day in Tokyo and the last day of 2012. I think those two things go pretty well together. Being that the start of a New Year is a religious holiday here in Japan, many of the government buildings (actually all of them we tried to visit) were closed. That didn’t stop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.brockshetley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}