Ebisu

Hanadan!

Post-trip:

The next stop was in search of Ebisu Garden Place, where this famous Hana Yori Dango scene happened.

From Ebisu JR station, it was quite a long travelator ride / walk to Garden Place.

“Ebisu Skywalk”
But I couldn’t see any sky!

We finally got out of Skywalk…

This is Ebisu Garden Place. It was pretty quiet and felt a lot like an “atas” place.

…waiting for Domyoji who never turned up…

Oops, I guess we got the wrong day.

Next item on the itinerary was the Hiroo mosque, one stop after Ebisu (Hiroo station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza line). We thought it’d be easy to find…we thought wrong.

We had to pass a bank, a park, a hospital, a bunch of office buildings and apartments AND the Chinese Embassy before we got to the mosque.

This is not a park. This is a jungle.

It was a good 20 minutes walk to the mosque, and since we were near the Chinese Embassy, there was a LOT of policemen standing guard (or at least I presumed that’s the reason why there’s a lot of them – one every 50 metres or so.)

We had to keep flashing the map at the policemen (I call it relieving their boredom) and 5 policemen later, we finally found the mosque.

The mosque reminds me a lot of the one at Eunos. (unrelated) There’s a graveyard beside it! Kind of creepy, since no one except for the guard (who also doubles up as the bilal) was around. I wanted to get out of there fast fast fast.

View outside the mosque. The graveyard was just below. Muslim graveyard? Shinto graveyard? Buddhist graveyard? No idea.

Our next destination: Tokyo Tower.

After questioning the guard at the Chinese Embassy, we decided that the best way there was the 20 minutes back to the subway station, and stopping at Kamiyocho station (still on the Tokyo Metro Ginza line).

On the way, I saw something curious – a door that stated Yoshitaka Amano. I still wonder if, could it be the Yoshitaka Amano?

We also received salaam from a passing guy with another guy, who I assumed was going to the mosque.

Tokyo Tower was another (literally!) uphill route, and we sort of tailed a young couple to the tower.

Tokyo Tower!
Unbelievable but we were there!

And then it was there, rising above us – something we’ve only seen on screens so far.
We went all the way to the top – to the special observatory tower (250m), where we were supposed to be able to see Mt. Fuji, but sadly, the foggy weather didn’t permit us to see it. We did see a few interesting scenes.

Dratted weather

For example, there were quite a number of cemeteries scattered throughout Tokyo. From the tower, we could see that all temples had cemeteries beside them.