Ikebukuro

From our train station, the first and last stop in Tokyo is Ikebukuro, so we figured that would be a good starting point for our sightseeing today. We got there at 9am after a half hour train ride. After getting out of the train station, I was very disoriented. Looking at a map was useless because I didn’t know where north was (I told Paola earlier that I wish I had a compass), and there really weren’t any street signs, let alone street signs in English. So I took a guess, and we walked around where there were lots of flashing lights and things like that. Looking in the guide book, it said there was an interesting place called Sunshine Plaza, so I tried to find that. It turns out that where I guessed north was turned out to be south, so we went exactly the wrong way.

However, while going the wrong way, we came upon a Buddhist temple. It was neat to see something that I had seen so many pictures of. This particular temple wasn’t a particularly special one, nor was it listed in our book, but it was the first one we saw up close. There were cars parked outside, but within the campus, and that took away from some of the awe. The doors to the temple were closed, too, so we didn’t go inside. Around the back, however, there was what seemed to be a cemetery, and a caretaker sweeping the leaves. We felt a little out of place since there was nobody else around, so we left before too long.

We tried to look at a map on the street that was in Japanese, but couldn’t make too much sense of it when a middle aged Japanese man came up to us and asked us in English what we were looking for. I told him, and he said that he was walking that way anyway, so we walked and chatted. It turns out that he lived in Seattle for a bit when he was a teenager. He was now taking English lessons with someone, and in exchange he was teaching the person karate. After a bit we had to depart, and he pointed in the general direction of Sunshine Plaza.

It so happens that I misunderstood where to go, and, again, we went in the opposite direction. However, we came to a different train station, so I looked at the map, and given the relation between the two train station, I was finally able to get my bearings, and we didn’t get lost again. However, at that point, having walked so much without already seeing the Sunshine Plaza, I didn’t care to backtrack again, so we instead headed towards our next destination, south to Shinjuku. On our way out of the Ikebukuro neighborhood, we saw the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space, which I think is a music hall. The architecture was huge and impressive, and if we want to see a classical music concert, it might be there.