Tokyo: Day 6

We decided to go to Ueno Park again today, but this time to check out the museums and the Zoo. Family Mart once again provided an excellent convenience store breakfast. I think Family Mart is my favorite convenience store right now; they have good メロンパン or melon bread, as it is called in English. It is really good.

Anyway, we got on the train and went to Ueno, got off and started walking into the park. Sadly there were no crazy performers. A little while after we started walking through the main section of the park we noticed that there was something going on. Shortly after an elderly Japanese man came up to us and asked me if I spoke any Japanese. I said “Yes, a little”, and he then proceeded to tell me that there was a bonsai festival today where people were showing off their bonsai trees. I told him that I thought bonsai trees were beautiful, and thanked him for telling us what was going on. He bowed and said, “you’re welcome, I hope you enjoy the festival” or something like that.

We walked to the festival and it was really cool, there were a lot of beautiful, flowering bonsai trees.

I kind of got a little flower happy and what can I say… they are fun to take pictures of.








Those were my favorites. Here is how the “festival” was set up.

As you can see, it was a gorgeous day.

We walked over towards the zoo and as we walked up we noticed it was closed on Mondays… it was a Monday. The zoo plan was out so we headed over to the Tokyo National Museum only to find out that it was closed as well, and in fact all of the museums were closed on Mondays. Both of us were like “Okay, what now?” Eventually after reading the book we decided to go back to Shibuya for the third time. I really like Shibuya and I guess Erin does too. Anyway, we went to Shibuya and walked over to a different area while looking for a Dessert Buffet (I know, it sounds awesome) Erin read about in the book. One of the landmarks on the way was Tower Records, which was a really big, really cool record store.

Another angle.

We finally found our way to the dessert buffet, it was called デサート王国 or Dessert Kingdom. The restaurant was amazing, to say the least. I mean, it was expensive, but worth it. The didn’t have just desserts. They also had normal food, including the best potato salad I have ever had and really, really good tuna salad sandwiches. The desserts were also amazing, gourmet desserts. I am really glad Erin found that place. It was awesome.



Across the street was a hat store, there are actually lots of these in Japan and fedoras are really popular. I tried a few on and I actually kind of wanted this one. The only problem was that it was about $350, which is money I am not about to spend on a hat.
I thought this picture was clever =P.

An interior photo of one of the nooks, I focused on the chandelier.


We explored a bit more and I took a photo of Shibuya at night.

Tower records still looked pretty cool, so we decided to go in. It was a really neat store and was much cooler than HMV (another music store in Japan). They also had a full section of Beatmania music, which I thought Derek would like.


As we left I took a picture of the Q-Front building and that intersection at night.



We went back to the hostel and basically crashed. We had a fun day.

Oh, and by the way, our new room is awesome. It is small yes, probably 8’x6’ but the beds have memory foam mattresses that are way more comfortable than the hard spring mattresses in out first room.