What I've found is that a lot of parks in Tokyo are not your everyday parks. I'm expecting grassy areas, children's play areas, and maybe even a basketball ring. However many parks here is like walking through an outdoor museum in which the trees are on display. There are concrete paths to follow, and the flora is barricaded off from the path. Only places to sit are steel benches, in which many of them are taken up by middle aged men having a snooze in the midday sun. But I guess it just a different style of park. Ueno Park does have an impressive fountain in the middle though, and there are plenty of vans selling snacks and street performers showing off their skills. There was a guy (who I presume was French) playing the accordion who was really popular with the crowd, it looked like he got enough tips to get food for a month.
Anyway, the main purpose of our visit to Ueno was to check out the Tokyo National Museum, which is the oldest and largest in Japan. It contained the usual things you'd expect - ancient pottery, weapons, clothing and religious artifacts. To be honest I didn't really enjoy this museum as much as I have others, and it was because I had no idea was I was looking at. Most of the item plaques had no translation, so all I had to go off was the year, and the introductory plaque at the front of the exhibition. I'm sure each item had some significance, unfortunately missed by us.
Something I remembered that was quite funny was the way the door man ripped our tickets. He took them one in each hand, and held them up in front between two fingers. It looked like he was trying to compare them or something. We were wondering what the hell was going on, but then he snapped his fingers which perfectly ripped off the stubs. We were like woooaah!! The guy was looking at us as if we were nuts.
Afterwards we wandered over to the main city of Ueno where the main bulk of the shops were. It had a working class feel - not glamourous, busy and bustling. The laneways had many food shops selling all types of spices, dried seafood, and other weird stuff that smelt as weird as it looked. There was an interesting shop that drew a large crowd, although I didn't really understand, the shopkeeper holds a big bag and proceeds to put items in it one by one. The price for the bag was 1000 yen and whoever yells out first gets it. The items were little knick knacks - chips, tissue boxes, soy sauce...Yep we definitely weren't in Shibuya anymore!
After passing the 10000th arcade shop we decided to go in and have a crack at the UFO 'claw' games. Gerald needed a new key ring and she liked one that had a little old school converse shoe attached to it. On my 3rd attempt to snare one up I caught one! The claw was slowly moving back to the ramp that led to the open chute, and by then I was already doing my victory dance. The claw opens up, down drops the shoe, and FFS it just sits on the ramp! Damn those grippy soles! Luckily I showed one of the workers who was kind enough to fetch it out for us. Not cool though!
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| Ueno Park |
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| Front of Tokyo National museum |
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| Samurai armor |
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