South Korea and I: Tokyo Sky Tree

I'm here in Japan for less than one week and I am already fed up with Onigiri (rice balls) for breakfast. I also don't want to eat Japanese bread, because it's either very sweet, very fatty or both. So now I switched to yogurt for breakfast.

Today was a very nice day. The sun was shining and it wasn't to cold outside. So we started by walking to Tokyo's new Sky Tree. On our way we stopped for a prayer and some photos at Asakusa's Sensoji Temple. Then we continued to walk along the Sumida river (Sumida Park), which has a beautiful promenade. We came across a lovely guitar player - all in all a pretty relaxing morning.

Once we crossed the river strange stuff happened. In front of a house a lot of people were standing around (over 12 persons) and started greeting us. They told us about a temple inside the house. I was sceptical about whether to in or not, but they kind of dragged us inside. There was really something like a temple inside a room. All the people there greeted us happily and then we were accompanied to the very first row of chairs in front of the temple. They told us about their religion and showed us a lot of pictures of their head temple at mount Fuji. Then they taught us their most important prayer.
During all this time we were holding our stuff closely, always being prepared to leave. It was really an awkward situation. I wondered what they wanted from us.
Then a priest stepped into the room and prayed the prayer with us, while us standing in front of him and he was laying something on our heads. YES, THIS was really really strange. Once we finished this they asked where we were staying, our names, etc. Of course, we didn't give them correct answers and left after they gave us praying beads as presents.
On our way to Sky Tree we wondered that this must be some kind of sect. We talked to the staff of hour hostel this evening and they have never heard of them. So we googled. The "sect" is a Buddhism branch and nothing to worry about.

Let's go on to Tokyo Sky Tree.
Tokyo Sky Tree comes with a shopping center, an aquarium, a planetarium, and many things more. You can easily spend the whole day there (as we did) and I can recommend it. I totally enjoyed my time there today. It's Saturday and a lot of Japanese people were there. It was crowded. But so much to see. In one shop you can see how candies are made or the food court, there are so much delicious things. We had gorgeous Nikuman and delicious Yuba from Hokkaido.
Because it was so crowded we had to get a ticket in order to get our real ticket. It's a voucher that allows you to enter at a certain time and only then you can go all the way up. Our time frame was 17:00 to 17:30. We had to wait for about three hours and used the time to explore the aquarium. It was really beautiful. They did a good job in presenting all the different kinds of fish. But sometimes I wondered if the aquariums weren't a bit small for their inhabitants. Some fishes were even held all alone without partner （￣へ￣）
All in all it was nice to see, but still too expensive (almost 20€ entry).

After that we had lunch. There are a lot of restaurants in the shopping center. We went for lunch at about 15:00, but the restaurants were still full with people waiting in line to get a table. We decided to go with a European looking restaurant, because nobody was waiting outside and we could get a table right away. It was a good choice. My friend had a Hamburg-Set: one meatball with egg sunny-side up, mashed potatoes, vegetables and demi-glace sauce. I had an Omurice-Set: Omurice with demi-glace sauce. And we both got salad and clear soup as side dishes. The Omurice was so good. Last time I tried it it only tasted like ketchup rice, but this time the ketchup taste was very subtle. Really really good ( ^ _ ^)
The meatball was very juicy. We think they put an extra piece of butter inside before frying. And the mashed potatoes were really delicious. I was surprised, because this isn't a dish that is eaten very often in Japan.
As dessert I had some Matcha-Icecream.

Then it was finally time to get our Sky Tree tickets. We had to wait in line for another hour and then went up to the first observation platform (entry fee ~20€). The sun had already went down. The view was gorgeous. Please go there and have a look at it yourself!!!! I will add some photos. It's definitely worth the money. You can also go up to the second observation platform (another 10€). We didn't go there, because we would have needed to wait in a new line for at least 20min in order to get the tickets. The view from the first platform is truly spectacular so we didn't miss the experience of the higher second platform.

For dinner we had 10€-Pizza. We wanted to have Monjayaki, but all the restaurants were full. We came across a pizza restaurant and decided to stay there. It's in Asakusa counterpart of Rox shopping center. The pizza is really good! I will upload the food pictures some other time. They are on my smart phone and I'm to lazy to get them.