Tuesday – Asakusa and Ueno

We were up early early again, but waited around to miss the peak hour subway crush. Not sure that’s something I need to experience. Then we headed for Asakusa – one of the older parts of Tokyo with old wooden buildings etc. After getting a local map from a tourist info place, we wandered in to what turned out to be a hectic little tourist shopping street. Plenty of tourists, stalls and tat. Yeah baby! hehehe. We had a bit of a look and steeled ourselves with some hot-off-the-press bean paste pastries (mmm). And some hot sweet sake which… we didn’t finish.

There is huge temple – Senso-ji which is apparently the second tallest in Japan. More of the incense, prayer boards, fountain for cleansing. Plenty of people, tourist and not. Not as nice as the other temple I think, but maybe the wedding and surroundings swayed it for me.

After a fair bit of walking it was back to the subway to get to Ueno – a huge park. There is a big pond there, that must be incredible in springtime, parts of it were just covered in dead water lilies. A little reminiscent of the apocolypse photos from sunflower France! We stopped for a while to listen to a busking drummer – quite amazing how many drums, xylophones, bells, clappers etc he managed to bang, tap, ring at one time.

Then we ventured into the Ameyoko Arcade, which is one of the only old fashioned outdoor markets in Tokyo apparently. A little like the fish market of Saturday, lots of fish, fruit, veg, fish, fishy things, fish etc. And sneakers etc. Very busy. Kinda cool that it wriggles around the area.

From there, M wanted to visit ‘electric town’ (where all the electric stuff is sold) and ‘sporting goods neighbourhood’ (speaks for itself non?) but I was exhausted and had a headache, so I came home and he went to check it out.

We had really, really, REALLY planned to go out again that evening to Shibuya, but once again, both asleep by 5pm and just too painful when the alarm went off, so we ignored it. We were both awake again by 11 or 12 and my headache was even worse, so I did what I could to get over that. SO over stupid sleeping patterns. Really.