TO-KYO! Hell, yeah! (1)

Last weekend was a long weekend. Great minds thinking alike, as they are wont to do, Danielle and I both fancied a trip to Tokyo, the greatest metropolitan area on Earth.
Saturday morning, early shink, arrived in Tokyo 10:30, subway to Ueno.
The first stop was the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno-koen. This is a beautiful place spread across a couple of buildings, primarily on Japanese art and cultural artifacts, with a hall of Asian treasures. That is, the Asia that Japan isn’t a part of, of course. Thankfully, the museum isn’t too huge, and doesn’t feel the need to display every single thing in its collection, so it’s quite manageable.
Back in Ueno-koen, we had a kebab (it’s a yiros in my neck of the woods) / samosa / chips / orange wedges lunch of gloriousness. Ueno-koen is very pretty, huge, and packed full of attractions, yet it still has NO GRASS.

Next, on to Kappabashi, which is a long street mostly of restaurant-supply shops. It’s claim to fame, and highlight for the average tourist, are its many “sampuru” shops; “sampurus” being the wonderful plastic food models displayed outside the average restaurant to entice in customers. I really wanted a bowl of spaghetti with hovering fork, or yakisoba with hovering hashi, or possibly even a big ol’ squid, but since anything of size started at 6,000 yen, I settled for some plastic tonkatsu (the crumbed pork cutlets, sitting on egg and rice) and a ramen keitai dangly thing. The lady I bought my fantastic plastic from gave me two keitai dangly things (an onigiri and a prawn sushi) for free! She was nice, as people who give you free stuff tend to be. I also bought a red lantern with “taiyaki” (fish-shaped pastry filled with delicious anko) written on it. Kappabashi is wonderful; why it’s not in the Tokyo LP is a mystery.


From Kappabashi we wandered through the quiet streets of Asakusa to Senso-ji. I think LP is spot-on about this
place; they say it’s certainly not the most beautiful temple, but it’s possibly the best-used and best example of a temple in action in all Japan. It’s wonderful, of course.

After a necessary Starbucks pit stop, we subwayed to Tokyo to collect our stuff. From there, through one baffling connection (Otemachi station? Booooo!), we found our way to our lodgings, at a hostel in Takashimadaira, which is a classic Tokyo suburb, with busy little streets and local small business surviving alongside the ubiquitous kombinis.




We lucked upon a fantastic place. It’s listed as a hostel, even though all the bedrooms are private, with their own toilet; showers, living areas and kitchens are shared, but only between three bedrooms. The third room joining mine and Danielle’s was empty, so we basically got a private apartment for the weekend, at about 3,000 yen each per night. Pretty damn sweet, I say.
















We soon subwayed to Shinjuku for dinner, looking for a particular Sri Lankan restaurant (we found it, it was good).
Yet again we got lost in the station; seriously, those subway stations are the most baffling thing in this whole damn country – we’ve been here a year and use the trains constantly, so if it’s this hard for us, then newly-arrived, non-Japanese-reading tourists must have a ball.
After dinner, we decided to go for a sample of the high life, and on an LP recommendation, found our way to the Park Hyatt’s New York Bar. That is one confusing hotel; it occupies the 39th to 52nd floors of an office tower (the lobby’s on the 41st, the bar on the 52nd); finding your way in is a feat in itself. We got to the bar, with its expected spectacular view, lounge band, and very wealthy (and probably very boring) clientele. Of course, you can’t get into these places without a bit of cash, and we paid a pretty obscene amount of money for one fancy drink each and some nibbles. Still, it was a fun bit of people-watching in an environment I’m not likely to visit often.