No day but today

Today after class I went with some people to eat lunch at Yasukuni Shrine. It is right behind Hosei, about a 5 minute walk. I definately will have to do that more often. There are lots of pretty little areas to bring your lunch and relax. Especially nice after Tokyo days of massive urbanization. I took lots of pictures of course.

After that I went back to the dorm. But instead of going back directly I decided to stop at a few of the stations I always pass. Since it is free for me to get on and off the train in between stops I thought I might as well take advantage of that. I stopped at 明大前　Meidaimae, where Meiji University is. But there was lots of construction going on, so many things were closed. Than I stopped at 千歳烏山 chitosekarasuyama, quite a mouthful. This place was surprisingly pretty good. Lots of little shops and stuff. I found one store that is a discount store which means they get leftover goods from department stores and sell them at reduced price. I also found a pretty hip clothing store that was very reasonably priced.

I've been looking online and at university for oppurtunities to work as an english tutor. Since that is pretty much the only part time I could actually do here. And today I found a post online and replied to it. Hopefully this can work out so I could cushion Tokyo prices a bit with a paycheck.

Pictures


This is the main shrine. The white curtain was held back because there was a service of some sort going on. You can see the Hosei building on the right side of the picture, just to give you a picture of how close this is.


This is the koi pond behind the shrine above. Koi is a japanese fish. Apparently all koi in Japan are considered property of the imperial family and it is a huge crime to kill or eat one without permission. Much like the swans in the UK.



These were some of the koi in the pond. The fish food machine was out of order otherwise I would have got more pictures of them all together.



More pictures around the pond area.



This is how the Hosei building looks like from Yasukuni shrine.



This is a traffic sign on the street in front of Yasukuni shrine. This road actually has a name "Yasukuni Road", but since most roads don't have names the signs look like this.



This is the Ichigaya station entrance I use everyday. Notice the upside down blue and white cone thing. I have seen this a few times around stations. It spins around like a barber shop pole.



These are the lines that are available from this station. I use the Toei Shinjuku line. (Then after shinjuku it turns into the Keio line) Fun side fact: The toei lines are the only lines left that are still government ran.



This is the platform I wait for the train to go back to the dorm. On the other side is the platform I exit when I arrive every morning.


This is a map of the Keio line. Keio is a line that mostly serves the western part of the Tokyo area. If you can see in a green oval in the centre of the map pretty much つつじヶ丘, that is my station I normally use, tsutsujigaoka. On the far right in a big red oval is the 新宿, shinjuku, station. And the Ichigaya stop is two stops after Shinjuku.



This is a timetable of train depatures for the weekday. Basically you have to find the hour of the day, and then to the right is the minutes that a train leaves. Black means it is a local train, stopping at every stop. Blue means rapid, it stops at fewer stops. And green means express, meaning the train stops at only a few stops. The minutes with red clouds around them means that a "women only" train car is available. Since they have a problem with women getting groped on trains here, they offer trains where only women are allowed in. I accidently got on this train car once, good times.



This was at Shibuya last night. I've heard this is the busiest intersection in the world. I'm not sure if it is true but I believe it. Everytime the lights say "walk" it is this busy. It's a blurry picture but it's really hard to get a photo at twilight.