Picture bonanza!

My apologies to everyone with dial-up. I went out last weekend on a boat tour down the main river in Tokyo and since it was sunny, I walked through central Tokyo. These are some snaps that I managed to take. If you want to and your internet connection can handle it, you can click on the pictures for a (much) larger version.

I bet you wouldn't expect Tokyo Station to look like this!



Most of these are of the area immediately outside the Imperial Gardens in central Tokyo.










I thought this picture was funny-who in their right mind would set up a tent on a 3-foot wide strip of grass with a busy highway on one side and a 10-foot drop to the moat below on the other?



Fairly typical Japanese highschool. This one is the newest I've seen though. Most of them look like they've been converted from WWII-era factories. And the playgrounds are almost always crushed stone rather than concrete. It's summer vacation but it looks like the highschool baseball team is still practicing hard.



















I thought this sign was funny. It's posted at a corner in a tunnel where there obviously must be a lot of collisions. They seem to be worried about the potential for people "clashing."













The homeless have some pretty impressive housing around here. It wouldn't suprise me if they had their own mayors. Ever see the movie Tokyo Godfathers (you should-it's great anime)? It's pretty much like the movie says it is.




Anyways that's it for now. Sorry about the huge backlog of pictures. I'll try to intersperse it a little so there's always a few pictures here and there rather than a ridiculous amount in one go.

let me get to sleep