Emperor era and tours around it are only conducted in Japanese - hence us just sticking to the free bit!!! To get here we needed to take 2 different metros and we managed it without much problem, in fact after using it and seeing the colour coded lines in practice it was looking a lot less daunting. It was a short walk up from the metro to the Gardens and we got a little token at the entrance. Just when we thought things were looking a little less complicated we arrived at the garden map! After a few wrong turns and a visit to the coffee vending machine to study yet another map we were sure this time we would get it right and find our way to the heart of the gardens. Hurray we did, and they were lovely, it was fairly chilly so we didn’t want to hang around too much admiring the views, as we needed to keep moving to keep warm.

After the gardens we were aiming to get to the Yasukuni Jinja Shine

which is a religious war memorial. We think it is the same one that upsets the Chinese so much when the Japanese Prime Minister visits it, so we thought we’d go and check it out to see what all the fuss was about. We were also starving by this point as it was past 12 and we hadn’t eaten anything yet. As we were walking up to the shrine we walked past a massive concert type building, there was a band sound checking and loads of punk/goth type girls hanging around. We also saw a café type place and thought we’d check it out. There were a few sandwich looking things but nothing that appealed or we were sure would be veggie so we headed over to the counter to ask the lady what food they were serving. You had to use a vending machine to pick your meal then hand over the ticket to the lady who would then cook your food! You can buy most things out of a vending machine in Japan, they are everywhere and sell anything from coffee to ice cream to beer, chips and fried rice! Fortunately the café lady came to