Any day involving a Panda is a good one...
28.02.2008
If you ever choose to go to Tokyo, come to Ueno. The entire district is incredible. Ueno park is huge, leafy and holds Ueno Zoo, the Tokyo Science Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, the Met art Museum, the Museum of Western Art, dogs dressed in Adidas tops, spitting Russians, temples, midges and cherry blossom trees. The zoo was our main port of call, and we got around it all in three hours, a visit including the usual zoo fare - pandas, elephants, an angry looking tiger, various hippos and a crocodile - as well as lots of little other critters and several boatloads of excitable Japanese primary school kids.
After that we walked around the park, There are some beautiful temples here, and it is weird to be confronted by a Confucian (sp?) shrine bordering a vending machine selling ice tea and icecream. I bought a cheap, rather silly t-shirt from a flea market near the central fountain the park, mainly for the attempt some designer had made to put across some poignant thought on memory but using very broken English. Please do not remind me that my attempts to do anything of the kind in Japanese would be catastrophic, as this would make me feel bad about myself and my purchase.
Just outside of Ueno Park is the Ueno district, starting with the posh 'atre' and 'oidi' shopping malls and broken up with streets part Camden Market, part designer goods, part retail chains. There's a lot to look at, and while eventually the same stuff crops up - lot's of small diners, bag shops - there's some real highlights here. Mainly the adverts for the fourth floor strip clubs promoting, in neon letters, brand names such as 'Splash Mountain', 'Slot Wonder Girls' and, ah, 'FST!'. Charming. The district isn't dirty, or to put it another way, particularly red-light, but if you go seeking, you shall find. We weren't actually seeking - I was looking at hats, but a giant neon sign saying 'FST!' is hard to ignore.
We then went to Roppongi again, and looked around the Roppongi hills area. Seriously highbrow, high budget stuff here. Very sanitised. A bit like golden soap - nice to look at, but not really for us to use and probably not very practical.
Analogies are not my strong point.
For supper we ate at a small restaurant near the hostel in Minowa. Robyn did not lose control of her spoon this time, which is good because this one looked heavier and wold have caused carnage. Now while very nice, I think being vegetarian in Tokyo is a lot harder than most of the guide books make out, mostly due to the language barrier, and secondly, those who wrote the books probably weren't vegetarian themselves. If you can't read Japanese, you are relying on pictures of the food, or, if available, the English descriptions, and three times in two days I have picked options that have either looked vegetarian and found beef sunk at the very bottom in sauce, or been described as vegetarian - ie cheese and vegetable stew - only to find no, there's beef here too. Even the plain noodles at the zoo had beef and fish at the bottom. Now I haven't actually eaten any meat, and am happy just picking it out, but it's a little frustrating. I haven't checked the water bottles yet for fear of finding traces of cow juice. It's like being back in Ireland...
Posted by robynflaw 4:03 AM Comments (0)
