Tokyo Day 3: Asakusa, Ueno

The third day I woke up just before the sun.  I watched it rise from our hotel room and it was truly one of the highlights of my trip.  Amazing!  When he started out, after struggling to buy an all-day pass with everything in Japanese, we took the JR Yamanote line from Ebisu to Shibuya and then we hopped onto a Tokyo Metro Ginza line to Asakusa.  What we did not think about was that it was rush hour.  The Ginza line was absolutely packed!  Everyone was squeezed in and the whole train moved collectively around bends, etc.  I could not wait to get off!  Today was another very busy day where we saw a lot of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.  In Asakusa we saw the Senso-ji Temple, Asakusa Shrine, and the Edo-Tokyo Museum.  We then took the Sobu line from Ryogoku to Akihabara and the JR line from Akihabara to Ueno.  We went to lunch and pointed to the picture we wanted to eat since nobody spoke English.  Once in Ueno park we saw the Kiyomizu Kannondo Temple, the Gojo Shrine with lots of torii gates, the Bentendo Temple in the middle of the reed-infested pond, went in the Shitamachi Museum (fun), loved the Toshogu Shrine because it was very old, and ended our day at the Tokyo National Museum to learn some history of Japan.  So much walking!  We ended our day with dinner in Gonpachi in Roppongi, which was delicious, although I unfortunately dropped my camera on the floor and the flap holding the battery pack came off!  More to come on that in the next post...