Old Town

Time for another update from Japanland. (Are you getting sick of them yet?) Admittedly, we haven't been doing much, just visiting random areas of the city and doing a ton of walking. My poor feet still aren't happy about that, so I keep looking to see if there are any good, comfy shoes in my size that I can buy to replace the ones I brought which are strangely all much less comfortable to wear in Japan than they were back home. No luck yet, unfortunately.

But onto more important things (like pictures), yesterday we visited Ueno, which is in the northeastern part of Tokyo, and one of the older districts. Since we never really have a plan when we get to these places, we consulted a map across from the train station and decided to head into the park which was just down the street.

It's a very big park with all kinds of things inside it, making it feel less like a park-park and more like some sort of amusement park,

This museum is in the park, as well as a music hall, a Western Art museum, a zoo, an art college, an amusement park, a pagoda, and a few temples. There are probably some other things I'm forgetting. But I guess Monday isn't a very big day for museums because they were all closed. It's just as well, since we didn't actually want to go into any of them anyway.

I'm really not sure what this little shrine was, since there was no one around it at all. If you make a 90 degree turn to the left from where this one was, there's a bigger shrine that people were constantly going in and out of, so I guess this one wasn't such a big deal.

 

I mean, I don't know why, since this one had a pot with a Triforce on it! Cinnamon noticed that right off the bat... so she took a picture of it.
 

Both of the shrines were in the middle of this big pond which is actually 3 ponds. It was a very pretty area, and as you can see, you could even rent a boat to go out on the water. But of course, that costs money, so we didn't do it.

Just a random shot of some fish in one of the ponds. Don't know what kind they were, but some of them were pretty big! Also, there were a few little turtles in the water too.

In case you guys were skeptical, we took a picture together just to assure you we are indeed both still alive and haven't killed each other yet. Also, we're super stylish in our sunglasses!

After all that walking, I was getting thirsty, so I coughed up 130 yen for what promised to be delicious tea (it said it was delicious in, like 3 places on the bottle). But oh man was it the worst tea I had ever drunk! For reasons I can't even comprehend, it tasted like it was made in a dirty coffee pot. I seriously expected it to have coffee grounds or something in it. Needless to say, I just couldn't bring myself to drink the whole thing and I won't be buying it again. Yuck.
 

As we walked the perimeter of the ponds, the entire path was lined with beautiful, flowering hydrangeas on one side. It's still kind of hard to see in this picture, but there were tons and tons of flowers.
 

Here's a closeup shot of one of the clusters (my specialty!). I'm surprised it came out so clearly, to be honest. The wind was certainly not making it easy for me to photograph them.

After leaving the pond area, we found some swings, so Cinnamon had to test them out. They were a little low for her, hahaha.
 

After leaving the park, we headed over to Ameyoko, which is kind of the "bargain basement" alley of Ueno, formerly Tokyo's black market after WWII. There, we found everything from clothing and shoes to golf equipment, pachinko parlors and bars, and a ton of places hawking fresh fruit and fish of questionable freshness. (Sorry, I don't trust fish that's been sitting in an open air market all day, no matter how loudly you proclaim it's on sale.)
 

Since we couldn't think of anything else to do in Ueno, we hopped back on the train and went to Ikebukuro for food, where we ate ate a nice little place called Miami Garden. Cinnamon had a tomato, basil and mozzarella pizza (which was tasty), and I had spinach and bacon spaghetti in cream sauce. That was... interesting, on account of the bacon seemed like it was barely cooked (it was still pink). You can argue that it's not Japanese food, but it's definitely the Japanese take on Italian - not something you can get in the US, that's for sure.

Just for Greg, I found this sign while we were walking back to the station after dinner. We didn't actually go to the cat cafe, but that's the first sign I've seen for one. (In case you were wondering, the Sunkus is a convenience store).

Today consisted of walking around Shinjuku and then going the wrong way to Yoyogi and ending up in Nishi-Waseda. But we got to take the new Fukutoushin train line that had just started operating on the 14th. The stations were very clean and definitely felt brand new. After walking around in Shibuya for about the 5th time, we came back home and watched an episode of Full House in Japanese. Good times.

I was able to upload one of the Kitty Guys videos to Youtube, so if you want to see some goofy dancing to a very catchy song, go ahead and check it out!

Two fantastic days

Once again, hello everyone~! Have you all had a good weekend? Doing something special for Father's Day? Over here in Japan, our weekend is winding to a close (as of right now, it's 8:40pm Sunday), but don't worry, because we have plenty of exciting news to share!

Yesterday, Cinnamon and I met up with my friend Courtney and her friend Megan to go see the *pnish* play, Samurai Mode. I had been wanting to see this group live and in person since 2005, so this was an awesome experience for me. And Cinnamon certainly enjoyed it too. The acting was great, there was a little dancing and plenty of sword fighting. We're both very glad we get to see it two more times next weekend.

This was a poster advertising the play just outside the main theatre, so we took a picture of us with it. (Don't ask what I'm looking at, because I have no clue.) After the play, the four of us hit up TGI Fridays in Shibuya to satiate Courtney's craving for American food, and it was almost 11pm by the time we got home.

This morning started of as an extremely early one (for me). We got up at 6am and were out the door by 6:40, headed to Harajuku to meet up with Courtney and Megan again so we could all go together to a street live being held in the park across from the NHK building. The street live was being put on by a 7-man group (similar to *pnish* in that they do a combo of acting and dancing) called Kitty Guys. Today marked the 1st anniversary of the group, so it was kind of a special thing.

The guy second from the right (with the white headband), Sueyoshi Kazuya, was actually in Samurai Mode as a guest star, and all of them have previously performed with other members of *pnish* in different performances, so the groups do share common interests.

You'd be happy to know I have video of them dancing (as taken by my digital camera, so not the best of quality), but unfortunately Vox has a max video size limit of 50mb and the video is 57mb... and I don't know how to make the video smaller. If anyone has a suggestion that's simple and doesn't require extra software, feel free to let me know and I'll upload it for you!

Unfortunately, we were only able to stay at the street live for about 45 minutes, since we had to immediately head to the middle of nowhere for Cinnamon's race, which was at 10am.

Or so we thought.

After hurrying as fast as we possibly could, we managed to get to the registration location (a middle school) at 9:50. But as it turned out, the women's race didn't start until 11! So Cinnamon had plenty of time to get registered and warm up before running.

I drew a helpful arrow in there in case you had trouble spotting the tall foreigner in the crowd. This was the group standing at the starting line (with the added bonus of a baseball game mere feet away). The race turned out to be on a dusty, rocky path that was far from scenic (a downer for Cinnamon), but it's not all bad news!

Since Cinnamon didn't like any of the pictures I took of her running, here you can see Gigantor herself (I say it out of love, of course - I mean look at how she towers over everyone!) right after she passed the finish line. The lady there is taking the timing chip off the back of her race number, in case you were wondering.

And out of all of the women in the race, Cinnamon managed to come in 5th! A big congratulations to her! She finished all 8k (about 5 miles) in under 40 minutes!

Oh, but that's not all!

She even got a trophy for it, a certificate (though we don't know exactly what it says) and a little gift! Plus, they gave her another gift for... some reason we're not sure of, so she made out quite well!

Here's all the stuff she got - 3 small towels (like washcloths), a larger towel (Lacoste brand!), her t-shirt, her trophy, a tote-like bag, the certificate, her time card and her race number. Not bad at all!

So, trophy and gifts in hand, we headed back for the station so Cinnamon could hit the shower and we could finally rest a little. On the walk back, we came across these guys, and I thought I should take a picture because they reminded me of gnomes (even though they're probably dwarves?) and we both thought Greg would appreciate it anyway. So if you're reading this, Greg, this picture is for you.

So far, we don't have any plans for tomorrow, but I think we'll sleep in for sure. We both got sunburned today (Cinnamon more than me), since we didn't figure we'd be in the sun so long. Also, stupid weather.com knows absolutely zilch about the weather in Tokyo. They forecast cloudy skies when it was very much sunny out.

(On a totally random note, we just felt another little earthquake a few minutes ago. It is such a weird sensation when you're not expecting it. It's so easy to try to justify things shaking as the result of thunder or a big truck going by, because living in Florida, the last thing you think of is an earthquake. I guess you get used to it after a while.)

Okay everyone, 'til next time~!