Day One- travels/Asakusa

This is the first in a series (probably 14 or 15!) of posts about my most recent, and possibly biggest adventure to date. In a word, it was AMAZING. But why say things in one word when you can ramble for paragraphs accompanied by copious amounts of photographs?!

So, Day One... we got up disgustingly early and headed to Manchester Airport. The journey was uneventful. Actually, if the second leg hadn't been 11 hours long it would have been almost pleasant. KLM are a very nice airline, there were plenty of good films to watch and even the food was good! Unfortunately I did not sleep at all so I was verrrrrrrrrry tired when we arrived at Narita Airport. After negotiating our way to the train station we treated ourselves to a drink. This seemed like the obvious choice for our first drink in Japan:

Needless to say, it was pretty disgusting. After no sleep and nearly a 24 hour journey we were not really the sharpest tools in the shed so it took us longer than strictly necessary to find our hostel (which was very nice by the way) but we got there eventually. Resisting the urge to go straight to bed, we headed out for some sightseeing. I felt like I was living in a dreamworld, mostly because I couldn't really think properly because I was so tired but partly because I was so excited that the Japlan finally came to fruition. The first thing we saw:

A good start, no? A much better start than lunch was, actually. Diving straight in at the deep end, we went to a noodle place (with plastic food and ticket vending machines) which turned out to be a sort of local place for local people. Cold noodles with barely cooked egg? Possibly not the wisest choice. We stayed in Asakusa which meant we were within walking distance of Senso-ji, a massive temple.

 It was so... Japanese. There are lanterns everywhere. I didn't tire of photographing them for the whole time we were there! There were some Buddhas and various other Buddhist-type statues. This one was particularly cute I think:

 A lot of statues around temples (and in fact everywhere) are wearing bibs and/or shower caps. Apparently they are dressed up by bereaved mothers who care for the statues as if they were their babies. V cute but also a bit sad when you think about it. Senso-ji temple is beautiful. There are loads of lanterns and lots of gold and beautiful patterns and kanji (which fascinates me, by the way)

 Oh, and wishes and fortune seem to be a big thing in Buddhism. Here you had to choose a stick and match the kanji on it with that on a drawer (there were hundreds of them!)

 Inside the drawer there was a piece of paper, telling you your fortune.

 I got regular fortune. Boyo's was bad. If you are lucky enough to get good fortune you take it home with you. If you get anything less, you tie it on here:

 and it is burnt to get rid of the badness. At first I thought that this was something specific to Senso-ji but it turns out that nearly every temple has something similar. Not every temple, however, has this:

DOGS IN PRAMS! I was so excited I could barely stand still enough to take a photograph! I thought they were a myth. But no, Japan really is as crazy as I thought!
Both Boyo and I were absolutely shattered from the journey so we thought it best to call it a day early and get some sleep. I think I was asleep by 8pm. The moral of this travel tale... if you fly 6000 miles, do not expect to do much when you first get there!