ANGELA B. PAN

Before leaving to Japan I googled “largest camera store in Tokyo”. Which lead me to here, Yodobashi. This isn’t just a camera equipment store, this megastore is amazing, overwhelming and awesome all at the same time. I mean you can tell just by looking at the escalators.

So each floor is dedicated to a particular electronic. The first floor was all cellphones, the second was computers, etc. Finally the 5th floor (but not the last floor of the department store) was the camera gear. I don’t know why, but I was kind of nervous. Maybe just excited nervous. But I really wanted to see if Japan had anything different than what I could purchase in America. The only real differences I saw was in the accessories, not really the camera gear itself. They had rows and rows full of tripods, rows and rows full of photo apparel, so many photo albums and framing ideas. It was a little nuts but extremely happy I got to see it in real life.

Shinjuku Gyoen park is the perfect place to view the cherry blossoms. The first time we tried to go, it was closed. We only had an hour the second time we went. And this was taken on the third attempt. But somehow we’d still get lost whenever we tried to go. I’d put it into our GPS and Shinjuku Gyoen sounded like Shinjuku”jail”. I was startled me every time I heard it.

Ok, so all the images are officially being uploaded in random order because this was taken the last night of our trip. This is of Shibuya, you know the place where they have the busiest intersection in the world. At this point, Andrew and I were so tired, full from dinner and just trying to make the most of our last night in Japan. I remember standing on top of this foot bridge and we were reminiscing on memories of the trip and comparing it to our last trip in Europe. At one point he got me laughing so hard, it was difficult to take this long exposure shot. No, I wasn’t on a tripod and was hand holding it. I know, sometimes I can be a noob.

I’m so glad I brought my winter jacket to Japan because it was cold most of the time we were there. Cloudy, windy with some rain off and on. I think the clouds made for better images but the most disappointing part about it was that the cherry blossoms weren’t blooming like I thought they’d be. The tree on the left was one of the most beautiful trees we saw so I’m glad we still got to see a little sneak peak of them.

We ended up taking the bullet train down to Kyoto and spending a night there. Thanks so much to everyone who recommend we do that because that little trip made such an impact. I loved Kyoto. What a great little city with so much history.

So in the little time that we spent in Kyoto, we got to visit the Fushimi Inari Shrine. It was so cool to walk through these torii gates. My favorite part was seeing all the light peak through the individual gates. I also loved the engravings. It was like a little surprised when you turned around.

There are so many great things about Tokyo. The ease of navigating the city, the amazing food, the night life; they all are fantastic. But my favorite part was definietly the people. The people of Tokyo are the nicest, friendliest, most respectful people I’ve ever met. From all the greetings, endless smiles and countless bows, there is a level of immediate respect given to EVERYONE in the country. And with the millions and millions of people living here, you can definietly see this in how clean and orderly the city is. I loved it.

This is definietly the first of many images I took while in Japan. I thought this was a cool intro to the city. Don’t worry, much more to come in the following days 🙂