Day Sixteen: Views High, Views Low

Trejkaz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:08:00 +1000

It was Sunday, and I had a free day which wasn’t initially planned. The weather was good, so I knew that I had to visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and get some photos of the surrounding skyscrapers from up there. After that, I knew I would be going to a park, but I decided to make the decision of which park, dependent on which platform of the Yamanote Line I happened to find first. (LOL)

It’s a nice building, really, on the outside and at least on the inside of the observatory. And going on a Sunday was a really good idea because there was nothing else happening in the building other than the operation of the observatories. I imagine that at other times of the week, there must be much more going on in there.

I got several shots of skyscrapers which look like plastic models from that high up. For some reason things seem more surreal from up there, compared to the view from Tokyo Tower.

On returning to the station, it seems I had found the “soto-mawari” line (the outer circle, which runs clockwise) first, so good… I get to go to Ueno Park.

Ueno Park is full of museums, but actually I didn’t enter any of them because I wasn’t interested at the time. It was also a bad time of year for appreciating plants, but I did take photos of a few of the buildings in the area.

The food vendors are all very impressive. I ate some of the largest takoyaki I’ve ever seen (¥500 – cheap!) and watched the guy making them. He was a real pro… not like the ones you see at festivals back home. No offense to the guys cooking the stuff back home… I think the guy at Ueno may have actually been superhuman. :-)

Returned to the hotel with some time to kill, so I finished the rest of my laundry (ended up coming home with only about four dirty items of clothing) and then went exploring the local area. Otemachi has main offices for many major newspapers. Other than that, I located Otemachi Station (I would need to be there the next day so it was a good thing to know where to go in advance) and found another convenience store with relatively low beer prices.

Discovered that this newest and cheapest hotel actually had on-demand movies, unlike all the other more expensive ones. Watched a couple of older movies which I never got to see, and another random one which I didn’t expect would actually be good (but I can’t remember the name of right now.) If you pack in the movie watching in this fashion the price is similar to renting DVDs, since pay TV is a flat rate per day.

Trypticon: Tag ueno

Day Sixteen: Views High, Views Low