Ueno
After our tempura lunch, we headed to Ueno Park, which reminds me a bit of Golden Gate Park, since both have museums. I thought it would be really cool, but to be honest, it wasn’t terribly exciting. We did find some (real!) sakura at last though.
Sadly, there were maybe two other trees in the whole park that were also blooming. It’s a shame we were about a week too early from full bloom for most of the sakura we saw on our trip, but I’m glad we saw some here and there during our trip.
But it was prime season for the plum blossoms, which were quite nice.
We saw one of the many temples (anyways, I think it’s a temple, I can never tell the difference between the shrines and temples in Japan…)
Just like all the other ones, they have the wooden boards where you can write wishes and a place to tie up bad fortunes.
Then we found a lake, which was filled with people and paddleboats. Seriously must have the highest paddleboat density of any body of water I’ve seen…
Also there was a couple feeding some fish. They were kind of scary.
Seriously, look at that mouth!
Some museum stuff that we saw:
Akihabara
The day was winding down, but we decided to hit one more place before we called it a day: Akihabara, the famed land of anime! Unfortunately, I only took a few pictures here because my camera doesn’t take night pictures very well, but I tried to capture what it looks like at night. Sorry for the slight blurriness. The rest of the pictures in this section are taken from other websites, which are linked in the images.
I wish I had done some planning before coming here though. I forgot to look up what are the main anime stores people visit in Akiba, but I found Animate!
It was super tiny and crowded. But. I finally found Prince of Tennis merchandise! I feel like I never see very much of it at anime conventions in the States, so I felt like I was part of a non-existent fandom. But it exists! Just somewhere halfway across the country. What I learned: Hyoutei nail stickers exist. wat.
I wonder if there are people who actually use these…
Then after some more wandering, we happened to stumble upon the building where AKB48 performs.
But they didn’t have any performances that night, so the top floor (where the theater is) was closed. It was interesting to explore that building though. I think most of it was part of a Don Quijote, then there were 2 floors of arcade (one smoking, one non-smoking), and @home, the famous maid cafe. I had some problems explaining what exactly a maid cafe was to my non-otaku boyfriend without it sounding too weird…
Then we finally headed back to our hotel Ningyocho and had nice, light dinner from 7-11. Gotta love convenience stores in Asia, they have more food selections than the ones here. Think I had some minestrone soup and my boyfriend had the ramen.
Next up on day 2, we head out to Shinjuku to meet up with my college friend Cristina and explore western Tokyo on a Sunday.
gybl travels 