July 20th // Imperial Palace (History) & Odaiba (History)

We woke up at the same time as usual just I woke a little later I had been worn out from the previous night. Today marked how it is one of our last few days in japan and for today we are going to the Imperial palace and for the last part of the day we are visiting the floating island Odaiba which has a lot of stores and markets to shop. but first we were headed to the Imperial Palace w all got ready went down to the breakfast area of the hotel and we went. we called a cab to the place it took about thirty minutes to drive there on the way we discussed what was our favorite part of the trip I said mine was the universal studios because of all the events that we went through.

Imperial Palace / History

Imperial Palace

   When we finally got there we decided to take a tour of the palace and even get a history lesson while we are at it. The palace is located on the previous site of the Edo castle, which is a large park surrounded by moats and big stone walls. The Edo castle used to be the seat of the Tokugawa shogun who ruled japan from 1603 to 1867 but in 1868 the shogunate was overthrown and the country capital and imperial residence was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo. While going through the tour we had to describe how to say certain names to sirvad because he could not say any of them this made up lag behind the tour group as we were reading signs and what they said after listening to the tour guide. we also learned that the palace was destroyed in world war two and was rebuilt in the same style we were able to see some of the parts of the palace that did not get destroyed and were built around the new version of the palace. After we had seen everything that we could have seen gone through the whole tour and read all the signs we were on our way to the next thing we had planned for the day so we hopped on a bus and we were off.

Odaiba / History

Our next destination was Odaiba which was originally just small islands until Tokyo started to make it into a massive island with landfills. Now on our way to Odaiba on the bus we had tried to explain the whole concept of the island and how it came to be to Sirvaad but he could not seem to wrap his head around it he kept on asking on who, how when, and why he didn't be quiet until we got there and he saw it for himself.

Odaiba

When we got there is just look like a big outlet mall but there was so much more there was hotels shopping malls and there was supposedly so many areas to go and eat that just what we had heard it look a lot more in person. The first place we went to the DiverCity Tokyo plaza which is a shopping, dining and entertainment complex that was opened in 2012. The first thing we saw was the giant robot statue which is from a series called Gundam this place had a lot of stores that related to tv series and other things we went in and out of stores. Also there was a statue of liberty but smaller since I had never been to New York is cool to see it even if it was a replica, after that we walked around for a bit we could not explore the entire place if we did that it would be really late into the night by the time we would be back at the hotel. So we headed back to the hotel for a good nights sleep we wanted to be ready for our last two days of our trip to Japan.

Written By Malachi