This temple is huge - and overrun by tourists. It was quite an astonishing walk from the temple gate to the actual temple. We also both made a wish for good fortune - let's hope they will come true.
Since we were in the area already, we walked from the Senso-ji to the Tokyo Sky Tree. After finding the correct entrance, we went to fourth floor which is the entrance floor of the Sky Tree. The lower part of the Sky Tree, up until the fifth floor, is quite huge and includes not only a big shopping area and food corner but also an aquarium (we didn't visit it but they have seals, and penguins and many kinds of fish..).
You have to buy a ticket to enter the actual observation deck and the queue for the ticket sale was very, very long.. Fortunately, there was a special counter for international guests and the queue there was quite short.
The observation deck is actually three floors at 340, 345 and 350 metres above ground level. To get there we took a rather fast elevator, which runs at 600 metres per minute once it reaches top speed (that's 36 km/h!!).
The view from the observation deck is stunning and makes you realize how big Tokyo really is - apart from the Tokyo bay all you can see is houses, skyscrapers, towers, more houses and... did we mention skyscrapers yet? Ok, there are a few rivers (it's quite astonishing how many of them run through Tokyo and how little you see of them when wandering the streets!) and other sights such as the Imperial Garden, too.
Unfortunately, the weather wasn't the best, so we weren't able to see mount Fuji on this day. Another nice feature is a small glass floor area on the lowest part of the observation deck (that's right: you see aaaaaaaall the way down, 340 metres..).
But 350 metres isn't the highest you can go. After buying another, also cheaper, ticket we went to the second, smaller observation deck (which was much less crowded, too). This is arranged like a spiral going up from 445 metres to 451.6 metres, which is the highest point a visitor can reach on the Sky Tree. Funny thing was that when we were at this level, two helicopters approached and circled the Sky Tree - at eye level. This was kind of... strange because later we saw them while we were walking through Shinjuku - way up in the sky. :-D
After the Nihon Ki-in we found ourselves a very nice little restaurant near the Yotsuya station where we tried several dishes (the servings were not especially big) and among them our first Okonomiyaki (4k: <3 ). It was really cool to sit at the counter and watch the cook prepare the various dishes right in front of us.
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