Hi everyone,
We had another easy morning today which was nice. After a lie in, Mum and I went and bought a few
things at Daiso near our hotel. We do have Daiso in Australia, but it’s a
Japanese shop and we figured there’d be a lot more local things
available and everything would be a fraction of the price. We were
right! I bought some cute snacks to take home to Rob amongst other things.
Once back, the three of us then went and had Acai bowls for breakfast at
the same place we went yesterday. Delicious once again! We then caught
the train to Akihabara. We were actually meant to do a walking tour here
today, but we decided we would rather tour around ourselves as we had
done a few walking tours recently. This area is known as the “geek
district”. There were lots of arcades, gaming shops, animal and maid
cafes etc. We walked through a few, and I used a capsule machine to get a
toy of a Pokémon character Adam and I used to play as on my Nintendo 64
in ‘Super Smash Brothers’.
We took our time walking along and ended up at Ueno Park. We had come
here on our first full day in Tokyo at the start of the trip but didn’t
explore too much due to rain. Today this is a huge park with lots of
museums, a zoo and a pond, but centuries ago it was the site where
samurais fought against the Meiji Emperor’s army in honour of the Edo
Shogunate in 1868 when the Meiji Restoration and change of power
occurred. We spent our time in the park today revisiting the pond we went to
two weeks ago, which had lots more water lilies in bloom this time
around, and then going to the Tokyo National Museum. As we approached
the museum there was a sudden downpour of rain which ended as quickly as
it started.
The Tokyo National Museum opened in 1872, and we spent just over two
enjoyable hours here. Mum kindly wheeled me around in a wheelchair as
the museum offered these for free, which really saved my legs and meant I
could enjoy it more.
We started in a building containing the Horyu-ji Treasures, beautiful
statues and figures found at a temple in Nara dating back to the 600s. Then we went to the main building which housed two levels of sculptures,
lacquer work, metal work, ceramics, samurai swords and armour,
beautiful kimonos, and even had a block printing station where you could
make your own postcard using five separate stamps. This was a lot of
fun and the end product looked great! Mum and I kept commenting on how
much Nan would have loved the museum, the lacquer work, ceramics and
kimonos in particular. She loved beautiful Japanese items and even owned
some herself despite never visiting.
Finally, we explored the gardens which were nice. We then caught the
train to Asakusa which is where we stayed at the start of our trip. We
enjoyed this area a lot more than Shibuya so were happy to come back to
its more peaceful streets and familiarity. We enjoyed an ice cream and
took our time walking through the streets.
Afterwards, we walked 20 minutes to a restaurant for a dinner we had
booked. This dinner was meant to be at the start of our trip, but got
rescheduled due to not meeting minimum numbers. It was a dinner to meet
two geishas and converse with them. It was us, an Indian family of three
and six Americans. Meeting the geishas was great, particularly the
first lady that sat with us (I didn’t catch her name but she’s in the
blue kimono in my photos). She asked if I wasn't drinking because I'm a teenager, which gave me a good laugh! Her English was great and she was very easy
to talk to and kind. Unfortunately that’s where the positives ended, and
we left feeling disappointed that this was our dinner on our final
night. The food was flavourless, and despite saying I couldn’t eat
uncooked seafood, 2/3 of the meal was barely warm shrimp, squid, fish
and clams. I couldn’t eat much at all, and Mum and Dad said that portion
of the meal wasn’t very good anyway. But we did enjoy talking to the
geishas, talking to the Indian family we sat with, and Dad got involved in some of the Japanese games they had people play.
We headed back to Shibuya and tried to go to a rooftop bar, but the staff lied to us about the expensive cover charge so we ended up leaving. It was all pretty confusing and kind of summarised what Shibuya has been like - busy, loud, expensive and overwhelming. We laughed it off, and are looking forward to Teamlab Borderless (a digital art museum) being a really positive and enjoyable end to our trip tomorrow. I'll be writing one last blog after that.
Love to all
Claire
Xoxox
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