Tokyo and Tokyo at night.

This post has lots of images, but thought it was worth it for the beautiful sights we saw today (not including the Quilt show). This morning was another brisk one and we were on the road by 9am heading to the Tokyo Dome for the International Quilt Show.

View from my hotel room, this is a building is called the cocoon tower and is 50 stories high, it houses three educational institutions.

Concierge in the hotel lobby.

There are signs like this all around the Quilt show, all signage is in Japanese and we obviously don’t understand them!

All the taxis in Japan are Toyota Crown, luxury model, old as the hills but clean and shiny.

This is near the Tokyo Dome and is a betting place, when we came out of the Quilt show it was packed and very noisy with lots of men placing bets and all watching screens.

There was a mosaic all around the edge of the dome. Apparently this is a baseball dome and it seats 50,000 people.

First glimpse of the show, looks small, but believe me we spent 7 and a half hours there today and saw about maybe half of it, it is massive and thronging with people. I went through 2 batteries in my camera. I will post some photos of one exhibit at the end of this post, but am too tired to upload a lot of photos and will do the quilt show justice in separate posts over the coming days.

Tonight Deb and I decided to not meet up with the other tour members and go to dinner, as we wanted to experience an authentic Tokyo experience and the restaurants that cater for 30 or so women aren’t the ones you should go to. So we headed off on our own.

This kind of dish is called yakatori, it was truly delicious, washed down, of course, with a nice French wine!

The following pictures were from one exhibit at the show, Hansel and Gretel. Everything was fabric and stitched.

The following pictures give you an idea of the amount of people there. For the first hour it was quite nice and you could get good photos of whole quilts but after than it was a bun fight, but quite fun. The above photo was the people in front of the Supreme winner. The photo below shows the people streaming in during the day, this was still going on when we left at 4:30. After fighting my way though to get a photo of the supreme quilt, I came out laughing and chuffed with myself as I was taller than most and could hold my camera above all the heads. There was an American girl doing exactly the same as me and we laughed together about this was the only time at a quilt show we were able to do that.

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