Tokyo - Cultural Sites

So in our time in Tokyo we hit some of the more famous cultural places during our day with Maureen. We met her at the subway station near the Meigi Shrine and park. It is a beautiful park with a historic shrine. It is the middle picture in this blog post. After that we went to the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo. Some people call it the Central Park of Tokyo as it is something like 3 square miles set off from the rest of the city with gardens, grass, stone walls, and traditional buildings. It was a nice change from the 20+ story buildings just across the moat and gave me a better appreciation for how people (OK, just the Emporer) might have lived a few hundred years ago. Afterwards we went to see the Tokyo Tower (local knock-off of the Eifle Tower) but decided against paying $8 to go up. So we decided to walk to a nice shrine we had seen nearby and that is the picture on the right. As one guy put it at our hostel here in Kyoto, you can kind of get shrine fatigue. They do all mix together in some ways, but Fernando says the stuff we'll see the next couple of days are the most famous ones. After our cultural excursions we went to the international district.