Day 8 - Various around Tokyo - 1 April 2009

Who else but Sarah doing the blog.  I am starting this while Alan is out exploring the Tokyo Electronics District (yawn). He will comment later in Red.

 

For all those who wanted to know, yes we did get in the spa last night.  It was lovely.  Don't forget to check out our photos.  There is a lovely one of Alan relaxing in the spa with the lavender bath salts. Luckily the spa jets were on when Sarah came in and took my photo so you can't actually see my man bits.  There isn't that much to see anyway.

 

It rained overnight but it was dry when we ventured out this morning, although heavily overcast.

 

We had booked the free shuttle last night to get us to the station and then boarded the train for Ueno Park. This is one of Japan’s most crowded, noisy and popular cherry blossom viewing locations with over 1000+ cherry trees. Here they were blooming but hadn't yet turned to the shade of pink which should be happening now, had it not been for the weather having been so cool.  Here we found a large number of people again setting up for picnics.  I don't know about you but sitting in the cold, on a tarp on a concrete path, doesn't sound like a lot of fun. When we came out of Ueno train station there were people absolutely everywhere. It was unbelievably crowded.

 

We had planned while we were here to visit Ueno Zoo, Japan's most famous zoo, helped by the fact that they have a giant panda, or should I say HAD a giant panda.  The sign on the entrance said "Ueno zoo do not have a giant panda".  When I enquired as to what happened to their panda, we found out she had died. I checked the internet when I got back to the room and yes, in fact she had died of heart failure almost a year ago.  That was pretty sad. I had been looking forward to visiting the panda. So, we didn't end up visiting the zoo. It's about time they updated all their signs etc throughtout Ueno Park to take off all the panda pictures and logos.

 

We continued our walk around the park towards the large pond area.  We walked past several food vendors and I saw some noodles that I liked the look of and Alan saw they were selling kebabs.  We walked around the Benten Hall Shrine and stopped to look at the pond.  It wasn't very impressive but they had some really cute ducks. We were expecting lovely big ponds but they were full of reeds mostly. We returned to the food vendor and Alan decided to have noodles with me after learning that he couldn't get cheese on his kebab.  Japanese don't like cheese apparently. How can you possibly have a kebab without cheese? That's just ridiculous! He then had a chocolate coated banana. We then walked to what was called "frog fountain" and that's what it was, a frog fountain.

 

We then walked to one of the many Tokyo subway stations.  Our rail tickets don't include subways so we had to purchase a ticket. Thankfully the machines have an English button. One thing I learned about the Tokyo subway, it is way too hot.  It was about 15 degrees warmer on their subway trains.  I thought I'd pass out.

 

A few stations later, we exited the subway to visit the Sensoji Temple, Tokyo’s oldest, said to have been founded in the 7th century. It was supposed to be very impressive but right now it is surrounded by a lot of scaffolding.  Nakamise Dori, is a colourful,and may I add, packed, shopping promenade, which extends from Kaminarimon Gate to Hozoamon Gate.  We walked the promenade on the way down to the Temple but took the back street to get back.  Much faster that way. 

Alan was excited when he saw a sign for Denny's, his favourite place in the USA. 2nd favourite actually. My favourite would have to be Olive Garden, the most awesome chain of Italian restaurants where you can overload on cheese to your hearts content. We walked up there but didn't go in ... we were still full from the noodles.

 

Then it was back to the boiling subway and then on the train again.  I choose to come back here to the room and Alan went on to the Electronics District.

 

He returned about two hours later thankfully without having bought anything.  It is always a little scary leaving him with money.  You never know how many Game & Watches he will want to buy. I spent a good hour and a half wandering through the Akihabara Electronics Town, which is the Tokyo quivalent of Den-Den Town which I previously visited while in Osaka. It's less dangerous and seedy than it's Osaka counterpart, but still has all the same mix of electronics and porn. I found a few obsolete 80s games which were very close to worth buying but I managed to refrain. All the shops are multi-storey so when I finished looking at a particular level I go up to the next. More than once I came back down in a hurry after inadvertently stumbling into the Japanese naughties section. Well, I don't read Japanese so I can't tell what the signs say about what's upstairs.

 

We spent the rest of the rainy afternoon watching things we had brought with us on the laptop to watch.  Alan was hoping to see Australia play in the soccer but after flicking around for a while, it looked like he had missed out but then, on it came about 10 minutes later so he got his Australia fix for the night. The commentary was in Japanese but I was more than happy to just watch with no sound. Australia are now all but through to the World Cup finals.

 

We rushed to get to the 8pm shuttle to look for dinner down by the station, as there is no food places around our hotel, unless you want to spend A$100 each on room service.  What we didn't know was that it was pouring with rain. They don't believe in shop awnings over here so there is very little in the way of shelter.  We ended back at Miami Gardens for dinner, with a pepperoni pizza and a spaghetti ....  We don't buy drinks if we don't have to as they are very expensive.  Tonight we had dessert (which are cheaper than a soft drink).  I had a very nice creme brulee and Alan had a tiramisu.  We made the 9.15pm shuttle back to the hotel, the second last for the night and now, I think, it is spa time again. We have an umbrella in our luggage but since we didn't know it was raining before we left our room we didn't take it. And if we had gone back up to get it we would have missed our shuttle bus. So we were the only doofuses out there tonight without an umbrella.  Actually, we weren't the only doofuses.  People were still picnicing in the park around the corner from the hotel.  They were on their tarp, on the concrete but now under umbrellas.

 

Hopefully the weather will improve tomorrow.