Until last night, it had been a few years since I was over to see Tokyo Skytree after dark. It’s on the east side of town in Sumida, and I don’t even think I’d been over there at night since before I got my aging iPhone X in 2018.
Obviously, half a decade in iPhone years is a lifetime, technology-wise. Already that model of phone, which was heralded as top of the line, feels like a dinosaur in the face of the three-eyed iPhone 15. But the Skytree is still standing, and here are three pictures to prove it. This attraction is still popular enough with sightseers in Tokyo that it was sold out last night when I swung by there after dinner at a local yakitori restaurant. The meal took me to a back street behind the office tower just east of the Skytree, and I had never seen it from that angle.
Yesterday, the wi-fi was down in our apartment building for part of the day, so I did a very analog thing and brought a bag of books across town with me to trade them in at Infinity Books. It’s a store in Sumida with a large selection of English books. The nearest stations are Asakusa or Honjo-Azumabashi on the Toei Asakusa Line, with the Skytree being one more stop down from there at Oshiage Station. I got seven dollars in store credit for five old books that I would have otherwise donated to the library. It was enough to swap out for a big, used, 775-page door-stopper of a novel that will probably keep me occupied reading for weeks to come.