Weather: sunny and hot low 20°C, high 29°C
Accommodation: Kimi Ryokan
We wanted to get all our laundry clean before leaving Tokyo, so we got laundry washing at 9 am (the earliest you can start). While it was washing Eskil played with Chloe. When they left he mournfully said ‘my friend Chloe is gone!’. The wash was hung out to dry, and we were finally off at 11 am. First we went to the JR station to change our Japan Rail pass vouchers for passes to start on the next day. Actually, 1st I went to the ticket office, not realising it was the wrong place to go to do the exchange. I waited in a long queue (trains were extra busy because of Silver Week), and when I finally got to one of the staff members he stood up to apologise for me having been an idiot who waited in the wrong place. It wasn’t his fault! He pointed me in the direction of the Information Centre, where we made the exchange and received our JR passes. Then we went back to the ticket office to make reservations for the Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko train for the next day and from Kawaguchiko to Matsumoto for the day after. As it was Silver Week the trains (and train station) were VERY busy, so our reservations the next day didn’t have us seated in the same car. But at least we had seats; our Sydney friends at the ryokan couldn’t get seats from Osaka to Hiroshima and for their Tokyo to Osaka train they all had seats in different cars (not ideal, especially as one of them was a 9-year-old girl).
Once all these travel logistics for coming days were sorted, we took the Yamanote line to Nippori. We walked into and around Yanaka Cemetery. We had walked around this area the last time were were in Tokyo, but today it was very busy with families visiting and washing graves. At shrines and the cemetery entrances they could purchase a bamboo bucket with flowers and with a can hanging on the side containing burning incense.
Eskil enjoyed playing in a playground in the middle of the cemetery and (finally) did a poo in his nappy!
We kept walking around the neighbourhood, and eventually Eskil fell asleep in the carrier on Scott’s back. We enjoyed walking around this neighbourhood last time we were in Tokyo, and we enjoyed it again. This area has some of the few buildings that survived bombing and fires in WWII, so it has a different feel to much of the city – and it has many shrines and cemeteries. We even did a geocache or two!
We meandered through the streets to Ueno Koen, and when we got there found that there was a big market in the middle of the main concourse in front of the museum.
We went to Starbucks again, then Scott and Eskil went to the amusement park in front of the zoo while I caught our travel journal up and spoke to a woman next to me who was knitting at the lovely wide stone tables in front of Starbucks. We walked through Ameyoko.
These shops on the right are actually under the Yamanote train line, so technically they don’t exist for land tax purposes – or so we were told.
Then we caught the train back to Ikebukuro. We went to Tobu to get more essentials at the Ito Ya (stamps for Eskil and another pen for me!), then got food from the Tobu basement (hooray!).
We went back to the ryokan to eat our dinner and said good bye to the family from Sydney, who would be leaving early in the morning to catch their train. After several games of Monkey Wins, we were off to bed as well.
More photos can be viewed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cragg-ohlsson/archives/date-taken/2015/09/20/.