Arrival, Japan day one and two, Ueno, Imperial Palace, and lots of food

The flight. It was long; so long that parts of my backside lost all feeling and did not regain said feeling for many hours afterwards. By the twelfth hour, sitting in the airplane seat had become an endurance sport, not exactly an active one, but one that hinged on the successful management of pain.

Occasional viewings of Kung-Fu Panda

and seafood curry broke the monotony (you’ll come to see how I organize most days by the meals, since I’m almost always thinking about food).

But we made it. After navigating through the convoluted rail stations, Nicole and I stumbled to our hotel.

Our room is actually rather large, and almost all of the staff speaks English, so checking in was easy. All we really did was sleep that first night, but I couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures of our toilet before going to bed.

Multiple cleansing functions.

On our first full day, we decided to trek over to the Ueno area, which is home to a park, zoo, and the National Museum.

Breakfast, tuna onigiri (basically a ball of white rice with cooked tunafish inside, wrapped in seaweed) and diet coke. Just like London, they don’t have real diet coke here, only the “new taste” kind, and this vitamin one. I’m starting to think that I’ll have to go without normal diet coke for the entire year…so sad. At least I was able to guess that the blue wrapping on my onigiri meant tuna, just like it does back home.

Here are a few quick things I’ve noticed about Tokyo before I get to Ueno Park:

1. It is really really hot. Like 100 degrees-humid-soaked-through-your-clothes-after-a-minute hot.

2. Guys don’t wear shorts, at least not on workdays. I expected this, but in the heat, it’s tough to deal with. I’ve been sucking it up and wearing them every now and then anyway. Oh well, guess I’m a tourist.

This was in the middle of Shimbashi station near our hotel. Just about everyone wears white shirts with dress pants.

3. A lot of people in Japan know English. From the counter lady at McDonald’s (yes, I did go once for breakfast out of curiosity, tastes the same, a little better actually), to the train station attendants, to people on the street. When they don’t know English, playing the mime game has worked well.

4. On the flip side, everyone assumes that I know Japanese, and that if they look at me hard enough and speak clearly, I’ll eventually understand them. This has given rise to lots of awkward pauses. And I’ve always thought that I looked prototypically Chinese.

5. There are much fewer foreigners than expected. Almost everywhere we go, cole is the only round-eye,(sorry), whitey(scratch that), um…pigmently challenged, person around. She gets her fair share of stares. Then again so do I. Maybe we just look funny.

6. Tokyo’s not that expensive. Really. Most food costs about the same, a typical meal is only about 600-700 yen, about 6-7 dollars. Nice restaurants do cost more though, and clothing is ridiculously pricey, even chains like The Gap. A pair of jeans is like, $120.

7. I’m not super short here! I’m around average height, but I think I must outweigh the normal Japanese guy by ten pounds. I’ve been sizing up a lot of guys by estimating if I could post them up in a game of basketball, and the answer is usually “yes, yes I can.”

8. Vending machines really are everywhere.

Ok, moving on to Ueno.

 

Map.

Water-lilies

Shrine.

Lights.

Turtle.

Kinda mangy stray cat. It hissed at me.

A video for reference, to illustrate how loud Ueno Park is. I didn’t know at first what was making that screeching noise, but it turned out that they were really large (and vocal) cicadas, and they’re not only in parks. Anywhere there’s a tree, you’ll find a screeching cicada. They’re so loud, sometimes you can’t hear anything else when among them. The crows are gigantic too. That’s me mumbling in the background like an idiot. Go amateur camera work.

Since it was so hot, we stopped for some shaved ice. We kept on trying to order it at the counter to no avail. We finally learned that we had to buy a ticket first. Later on, we came across a few eateries that worked on the same premise, which we liked because it took the challenge out of ordering. Just pay, press button, and hand over ticket.

One yellow ice please. Mmm, lemon kinda.

At the other end of the park was the Tokyo National Museum. We slowly trudged our way up to it. Wet jeans is a horrible sensation.

A scroll depicting an earthquake. The Japanese used to believe that giant catfish underneath the ground caused earthquakes.

From the museum bookstore. A Japanese phrasebook. “He whittled away at his body.”

Sculpture of unidentified animal.

We had lunch near the train station, which has become a theme for us. Every train station has tons of restaurants in or around them, and they’re usually the best bargains. Above are soba noodles with shrimp tempura.

Gotcha shrimpy.

Also in Ueno is the Ameyoko Arcade shopping market, full of fun stuff

like fishies

and hormone drugs.

This was one of the ticket machine restaurants I was talking about. We ate dinner here. The counter looked like it was straight out of an old deli, but this one served grilled steak and chicken over rice.

Pretty good. Super cheap.

This poster is in the train stations. I get the sentiment, but what does the “Please do it at the beach.” refer to?

So that was it for the first day.

Now for day two.

Day two wasn’t the most active of days. The main part was spent at the Imperial Palace East Gardens. Now, on a normal day, say…any day that isn’t hotter than a sauna, cole and I would be good for an entire afternoon of walking, but this wasn’t a normal day, this day was hot even by the insane Japanese standards. To combat the heat, Japanese people like to carry around umbrellas to block the sun, and wipe themselves off with sweat rags.

And, the Japanese idea of a park does not automatically mean that there will be shade. Nope, sometimes you get large large stretches of open pavement and gravel, like at the Imperial Palace.

A diet coke to help with the heat. Ick, can’t take the new taste.

The Imperial Palace itself was closed (of course we didn’t figure this out until we reached the gates), but the gardens were open.

A part of the inner palace region, segregated from us common folk.

Gardens.

I could say more, but really, most of what cole and I did was sweat, and trudge our way to the rest stations to sit in the a/c and eat ice pops.

Would have been really nice, if it was thirty degrees cooler or so.

Lunch was udon noodles at this cute place under the train tracks. That croquette was really good.

Ginza at night.

Dinner was under the tracks too (yeah we really liked the tracks). It was an Italian restaurant, or at least a Japanese version.

The pizza and spaghetti almost tasted right.

By the time we finished dinner we were too tired to do anything else. Walking around under the sun all day was more than enough.

We’ve probably sweat off about five pounds each by now. It’s been worth it though, to see the sights.

On that note, ends the second day of Tokyo.

Next post coming up immediately: buns, buns, and more buns.