Egg McMuffin: Breakfast of Champions

Note: the title of my blog comes from Andrew. This morning my father walked in with breakfast, and he decided to get my brother some McDonalds, to which my brother received graciously by saying "Egg McMuffins! Breakfast of Champions!" haha

Today was a bit crazy. Things didn't work out at smoothly as my family would have liked. We had a tour of the Impirial Palace at 10, so we planned on taking the subway at around 8:45, but people kept forgetting gloves, metro tickets were lost, and we were just lost! We couldn't find the line we needed to get to the Palace, and when we did we had to get out of the subway and get back in another way. All in all, it was a massive fail and we barely made it to our tour. However, we did make it! But they ran out of audio tours, so we had to walk around and listen to some guy tell us all about the place in Japanese. My brother, who was tired, wasn't paying attention and didn't really translate for us. So we just had to guess what was going on. The next day is the Imperor's birthday so there were lots of people cleaning the place up. For example, every year they attach a glass balcony to the Impirial Palace. So today, they had about 5 guys cleaning the glass on the balcony. They even had three other people telling them where they had to clean some more. It was funny, cause my uncle asked me "So, what happens if a bird poops on the glass? Have they thought of that?". Either way, it was pretty cool to see the Keep and Guardhouses and such. Some of the buildings date back to Shogunate times (1600s), while others were rebuilt after "the fire" in 1945 (or as my mother says "probably when we bombed the shit out of them"...so politically correct!). We also walked around the gardens and grounds of the palace grounds. Since its winter, there weren't any flowers or blooms, but there were pretty views of the city. Afterwards, we headed to Ueno and walked through lots of streets with vendors. Saw some cool food, like large octopus tenticles! We had lunch at some place that was popular for its octopus balls (which were suprisingly good). We then headed into Ueno Park. The park is reall really big! It has temples, lakes, and a zoo. We didn't have enough time to see all of it, but either way it was really nice.

After Ueno Park, we headed to one of the government buildings that had observation decks in them. I must say, the view is pretty awesome when you are on the 45th floor of a building. We could even see Mt Fuji in the distance. Since then, not much has happened. We ate some food, walked around, took pictures, got our tickets for the bullet train to Kyoto (can't wait!!!), and did some window shopping (which also included walking into a huge department store where very strange yet hilarious head pieces could be found).

Tomorrow morning its off to Kyoto (the very very old capital of Japan). So excited!!!!