Happy 2012, the year of the Dragon!!

We travelled to Tokyo to celebrate the new year! We took the shinkansen, the fast bullet train, and bought a nice ekibento, which is a lovely little lunchbox especially made for train travel.

Kyoto and Tokyo have no snow, but the area in between was completely white!

New year is celebrated really differently here in Japan. It’s very quiet, no fireworks at all (in Japan fireworks are more a summer thing). Instead, people all go to shrines at 0:00 to pray, eat and have fun!

These decorations are found everywhere during new year.

All the shrines and temples are crowded with people, standing in long lines to pray at the temples  and ring the bells.

Many different stalls with all kinds of food, if you’re still hungry at 2 am :-p

We burned some incense for the new year!