A nice, but Long Day of Walking!

Well, this blog entry is talking about what happened on November 14th (２００７年１１月　14日（水）) (For the person interested... and for the people that can see Japanese fonts, notice the （水）after the date. That is the day of the week without the rest of the Kanji. (sui for Wednesday). They almost always have day of the week in brackets at the end of a date in TV or advertisements, etc...)

Also, please note there there is one more blog, one entry below this one that you might not have read yet. It was written today as well.

Ok! I had 2.5 hours of sleep.... Thats how I started that day.... Joy...

However, I got sleep in a park in Tokyo... so its ok. (It's ok, its normal for people to sleep in the park, not just homeless people, but buisness people too. If you're tired, you rest :) ) However, that was only an hour or so. So when I was finished (rudely awakened by having to go to washroom...) it was 11時30分 (11:30 AM). I began my usual wandering. This time, I had a location to get to though; The last two major wards of Tokyo, Ueno and Asakusa. I eventually got there... quite hungry, and keeping an eye out for a place to eat. I didn't want to spend lots of money that day though, so I decided to find a seven eleven (yes, they are EVERYWHERE here). Seven 11's have good food in Japan :D.

While looking, I took my first picture of Ueno, you can find the Ueno pics here in the Tokyo album, they and the Asakusa ones are at the top of the list of pictures.

Ueno was neat, first off, I walked through a set of streets that were shopping streets. They were walking streets, as many are here (no major roads, you just walk, no sidewalks, but cars are allowed to still go through). There were many different kinds of shops... like... every kind, and there were thousands of them. It was quite neat. There were also HUNDREDS of Pachinko Slot buildings (a kind of slot machine gambling). Pachinko is very popular here in Japan... But in this part of Ueno.. it was ridiculous.

It took me 30 minutes or so to find a 7 11. Which is odd in Japan... That was a long time. I got my lunch, and began walking to find a place to eat.

I found it right away. Ueno Park. What a beautiful place. You can see it in the pics. It reminded me of Stanley Park in a way. Meaning the Ducks, Pidgins, crows, etc... were VERY friendly, and there was thousands of them. The park had a lake in the center of it, and you could rend row boats for a romantic float on the lake. Of course, since I was alone... I didn't go on it... There was also strange and large plants in the water. A whole FIELD of them across the whole lake. You can see that in the pictures. I also found turtles! Wild ones! I've never seen wild ones before in my life... There were warning signs around warning of Snap Jaw turtles (at least I assume thats what it was translated as). They said don't go near them, because they bite HARD. But I didn't see one :(.

It was just after I left the park when I saw it... Something I didn't expect to see there. A sign saying (cept in Japanese, which I read with no help! Woot because of the Kanji), "Left 2 kilometers to Tokyo University". (Here's the Japanese: 東京大学　左2キロ )

Why is this interesting? Because Tokyo University, or Toudai as some say here (It's Todai because of how you say it in Japanese; Toukyou Daigaku), was one of the major object in the first manga (a kind of comic story, but for any age, VERY popular in Japan) that I read, Love Hina. Love Hina was one of the things that got me interested in Japan. They had pictures (drawn of course) of Toudai in the manga, and I was now determined to find that exact same building they used in the manga. It took me about 2 hours to find Toudai... cause I took a wrong turn. Oops, but oh well, cause when I do that I always find neat things in backstreets. By the way, Ueno also has HUNDREDS of smaller temples of both Shintou and Buddhist religion. That was neat.

Toudai was neat. I did find it. And its kind of small compared to say... UBC. But it has old style buildings in it... Kinda made me feel like I was walking around Hogwarts in Harry Potter... Anyways, here is the picture I went there for :) right here

Eventually I made it to my next destination, Asakusa. Asakusa has many old Edo age (1600's to 1900) buildings and shops. Mostly shops though (like, the stuff in them was old), because of various earthquakes and fires over time destroyed everything. Still, Asakusa has many neat shops. There was also a Buddhist Temple that is still being run by a direct family member to the person who founded it in the 1600's. There is also the famous temple that all the tourist go see. Here is a video of that temple:



It was neat. Especially the strip mall just outside of it, which had EVERYTHING you could imagine for souvenirs... Lucky I'm not the kind of person that buys everything I see :).

I then walked.... back to Akihabara.....
Thats about 3 kilometers...
I had already been walking from 11:30 AM to 4:30 PM straight....
I was tired after that walk...

It only took me about an hour though.

Ya, so that was that day! I walked for 7 hours total that day... I'm getting in good shape.... cause the next day I walked even more... I'll blog about that soon as well.