An update before I promised it? What is this madness?
Today was a gloriously sunny and somewhat warm day in Tokyo, and as I didn’t have to go to work at all (yay!) I decided I would go exploring in Ueno park. This proved to be a very good idea as I got some really great photos. Ueno is only a few stops from me on my local train line so there really was no excuse to hop on it with my camera and spend the day looking like a tourist! Yay!
See those little lanterns with Japanese writing on them? They’re everywhere. Literally. You can’t move for the things as they run overhead along every single major path through the park. I don’t really know why but they are nice to look at and don’t cause many problems. A bit like Switzerland.
Ueno park is also absoloutly full of two things. The first is stray cats. They are all over the place and they sort of stroll about in the sun waiting for young Japanese couples to come and fawn over them, and I assume then pass on terrible diseases to them. I am a big coward when it comes to cats (you can never tell what they are thinking) so I didn’t get very close to them. Still, here are photos taken from a safe distance;
The cat in the third picture was walking straight towards me when I took this photo. Afterwards I ran to a safe distance and mocked it.
The other thing that Ueno park has in many is homeless people. Not much to say here – they sleep on every bench in the park and they frown at foreigners alot. I didn’t take any photos of them. Sorry.
Ueno also has a very big fountain in it. Whilst I was walking around it, some schoolchildren approached me to interview me for a school English project. I enjoyed being interviewed by them, but it depressed me that this gaggle of 13 year olds were using a similar level of English as some of my 17 year old students. Oh well.
Finally, the world famous Japanese cherry blossom (sakura) has begun to appear. Since I was not really prepared for taking photos of it today, I only took a few, but I’ll try to head out to the park again soon to take lots of shots of it. The sakura is blooming very early this year, and by next week it should be in full swing.
I’m super proud of the third picture in this set. So much so that I made it the banner of the site for a while. It’s also the first time that the header of the site has been a picture I took.
Asukayama park is like a smaller Ueno park, basically. I’m going to put up a couple of my favourite photos from it. If you want to see the rest, they’re in the gallery. It’s only 4:30 now, and it’s still warm and bright outside, so I’m going out shopping. See you later!
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The lanterns are up in preparation for the sakura, which will fill Ueno park just like the hordes of drunks ;) The path by the river in Oji will look 100x better too, those trees are all sakura!
That tree you took a photo of is probably a plum, which bloom a few weeks before the sakura. Lovely none-the-less.
And yes, be scared of the cats! They number of kitty diseases, parasites and other nasties they carry is scary, and some are transmittable to humans. Oh how I laugh at the people who pet the damn things.
And finally, if you do want to upgrade the camera, lemme know, I might be able to find a good deal somewhere (or you just go to yodobashi and abuse the point card).