For the first time in a long, long time I was home on a weekday by five. I attended a volunteer activity setup by the company I work for for most of the day and came straight home afterwards. It was a comfortable summer evening – a little warm, partly sunny…a good chance I decided for a walk with my camera in the fading daylight. I walked up to Ueno Park, which is about a 15 minute walk from where I live. The park was filled mostly with people crossing it heading for Ueno station on their way home or heading for one of the restaurants around the edge of the park. I came across the public baseball field and took a few pictures of the game and the other people who had stopped by presumably on their way home to enjoy the fine Friday weather. The game was being played by two team of fairly young guys and the spectators were mostly men in the 50′s who were probably recalling when they used to be the ones on the field.
I didn’t have much chance to take pictures today since it was raining fairly strongly. So instead I thought I would introduce you to my local supermarket. It’s actually a pretty small place without that much of a selection, but it does the trick for most of my needs. Here are a couple pics of what’s available.
The vegtable section…
The seafood section…
Some sashimi and fish filets…
The cold drinks section…
I visited the Edo-Tokyo Museum on Saturday for the first time. It’s located in an area of town called “Ryogoku” just two stops down the train line from where I live. Ryogoku is famous as the Tokyo Sumo tournaments are held there and there are also many sumo stables in the area. The museum has displays covering the various important time periods in Tokyo’s history. The also seem to have some volunteer tour guides and translators on site and many of the displays have an explanation written in English.
I had a quiet weekend but unfortunately the area where I live, Akihabara, is in the headlines now. This article from the New York Times gives the basic story of what happened (7 people died after being stabbed by some lunatic). The intersection where this occurred is just a two minute walk from my house but I really didn’t realize anything was going on until about an hour after it was all over. I was watching TV and generally being lazy and kept hearing the sound of hovering helicopters, which turned out to be from all the major news networks. I’m fine but a lot of people weren’t so lucky. Beyond me why someone who ever do this.
This morning I was pleased to wake-up to bright sunlight after the cold rain of yesterday. It was a beautiful day in Tokyo and across a good portion of Japan. I decided to not stay in the city and head for the country side. I jumped on the 9:28 bullet train headed for Niigata. I got off at Echigo-Yuzawa, the station serving the small resort town of Yuzawa, famous for skiing and popular given its easy access from Tokyo (the bullet train gets there in just over about an hour and fifteen minutes and deposits you at the base of the slopes). The skiing season was long since over, though there was some snow on a few of the trails I walked on and certainly still some snow on the higher peaks of the Japanese Alps. The town was quiet with few people and so I headed straight for the ropeway that takes up to 166 people at one time up to the Yuzawa Kogen (Yuzawa plateau) in about 7 minutes. Fortunately only a few other people were on the cable car and just a few more had arrived at the plateau before me so it was a nice break from the crowds of Tokyo. I spent the remaining part of the morning and the afternoon walking around taking pictures. There were not so many flowers in bloom but still the green hills and trees were calming. The longer hiking course wasn’t open yet (still some snow remaining and the trail hadn’t been fixed up yet for the tourists) so I only took the shorter course around what is actually a ski area in the winter. All-in-all a nice day trip from Tokyo. I would probably go back again given how easy it is to get to from Tokyo.
