Wednesday, November 7, 2007

ベトナム大使館、代々木八幡宮、明治神宮

Today I went on a hunt to find the Embassy of Vietnam. Definitely not as easy as I thought it would be. It's in a sort of apartment/resiential area, so I kept thinking I was in the wrong place. Anyway, I was able to get my visa, good for one month of tourism. XD I also booked my flights, so I'll be leaving on December 23rd, leaving on December 30th, and arriving back in Tokyo on December 31st. I had a little bit of a panic attack when I found out that the flight to VN I was going to book was filled after I'd already booked the domestic flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang, but I was able to find an even better set of tickets, so it worked out well. =)


Besides that whole bit of organizing and arranging, I stopped at the Yoyogi-hachiman shrine that was on the way to the embassy. (See above.) It was really small, but people really go to it since I saw about 5 people there. On the way back to Heiwadai, I also stopped at Meiji Jingu, which I'd been overlooking on all my trips to Harajuku.


Meiji Jingu has one of the biggest (if not the biggest) wooden gate in Japan. There were also a bunch of sake barrels stacked up like a wall next to the path leading to the shrine. I'm not exactly sure what it was there for, but it looked cool. XD I took a picture of the sign..maybe one of these days I can figure out the purpose of it. One of my favorite things at Meiji Jingu is the tree where everyone places the votives they've written their wishes on. There are sooo many of them in so many different languages. (I saw Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, French, German, I think it was Arabic...and a bunch that I couldn't really identify.) It's kind of cool to see so many wishes and hopes all in one place.


I didn't write one myself. Maybe I'll go back one day and do one. I was going to, but I didn't know what I wanted to write. There were some families taking their 7, 5, and 3 year olds to temple for the Japanese 七五三 (7,5,3) thing. It was really cute to see them all dressed up and trying not to step on the middle of the gate when they walked in. (You're suppposed to step over it, not on it.) That's all for now!