Tokyo, Day Three.
Photos to be added
Laurence slept long and well, but upon waking we decided it was perhaps best to return to Toronto rather than risk further problems or worsening. We even booked return fares from Tokyo to Toronto for tomorrow, but they were cancellable within 24 hours… which we did. After being out and around for a few hours, he felt much better although still needing to take it easy, go slow, and take breaks. He decided not to return home, and continue on instead, and I cancelled the freshly booked return flights, so tomorrow we’ll continue on our journey, leaving Tokyo tomorrow morning for Mt Fuji, as we work our way south-west to Kyoto over the next few days.
That said, we had a good morning and early afternoon, getting back to the hotel around 2:30, after which Laurence wanted to not push it and instead rest and hang around the hotel. I planned to go back out, but never did as I wound up spending hours trying to figure out travel plans for the next few days, which were maddeningly difficult to do in terms of figuring out the best way to get to our next couple of destinations and trying to book bus tickets on line.
But besides all that, it was a good last day here in Tokyo. After taking a walk early in the morning, we had breakfast and then took a short subway ride to Ueno Park, in the nearby Ueno district. Lovely weather again, and a lovely park. A pretty decent sized park of 130 acres, which also includes the Ueno Zoo, the park features several beautiful and historical temples and shrines, art and historical museums, and a beautiful peony garden located near the equally beautiful Ueno Toshogu Shrine. This was the perfect time to visit the garden, currently in full bloom and carefully and beautifully laid out, with small Japanese parasols providing a traditional Japanese look and shade for the flowers throughout the garden. Lovely. I certainly appreciate a nice looking garden.
We visited the various temples and shrines (I can’t tell tell difference, but the temples are Buddhist and the shrines are Shinto, and I think sometimes cross both spiritual practices), some larger than others, walked quite a bit, but slowly and carefully, and especially when we encountered steps, and wound up sitting for a while by the boating lake in the park, watching the heron paddle boats on the lake, as well as watching actual white and blue herons fishing in the water. A lovely city park, in the heart of surrounding busy city streets, providing a tranquil and serene natural environment.
The park is actually right opposite the Ueno subway station, and as we headed back we spotted the Ameyoko street market, which, like Ueno Park, I had added to the list of places to visit in Tokyo. And, unexpectedly, there it was, right in front of us.
Like all street markets, it was lively, bustling, busy, and packed with vendors, stores, produce and meat shops, and street food of every kind, and pretty large. Like some of the Mexico City street markets, it was fast moving, but much cleaner and well-organized, and pedestrian only. These scenes, filled with the activity of local and daily life, as well as history, are far more interesting and captivating to me than the glitzy, upscale, fast moving, post-modern aspects of the big city, and are grittier and for me have far more character and depth, and it is areas and scenes like this that draw me to cities, rather than the lights, flare, buzz, buildings, and energy of big city life.
Like almost everywhere we’ve been, unlike our expectations of Tokyo as an expensive city, the market had low prices for most goods. In fact, Tokyo not only is not an expensive city, or at least in our experience here throughout the city, but is inexpensive and substantially less expensive than the U.S. and Canada.
We took the short ride back to our hotel, walking a little more in the area and checking out a nearby supermarket, and then headed to the hotel, where Laurence stayed in the downstairs common area and ate a prepared meal from the supermarket (it wasn’t very good, it turned out), and I headed to our room for what I thought would be a quick look at our travel plans for tomorrow and the next couple of days after that, but actually took hours. I had planned to visit the Tokyo Tower (the Eiffel Tower replica) and check out the views, but never made it. Even now, I’m still not quite certain in terms of how we get to Mount Fuji tomorrow, Hakone the day after, and then to Kyoto, taking the bullet train (shinkansen) from Odawara station on Friday.
Laurence pretty much packed it in for the day, feeling much better, around 6:30-7, and after some blogging I went out to eat, and ate a nice little meal at a joint not more than 5 minutes from the hotel, and went to bed myself around 10.
Tomorrow, we take a cab to Tokyo Station, where we (I hope) take the bus to Kawaguchiko station, near our next hotel in the Mt. Fuji region.