I’m continuing my travels, though I will admit, the dreaded cold hit me pretty hard yesterday and given it was pouring rain all day I opted to not wander around Akihabara and instead took a bit of a rest and went to some local bookshops and cafes to just kind of relax. I do however intend to hop a train over to Akihabara just as soon as I finish drafting this update as it is not raining today and I’m feeling pretty good. If you missed my first update check it out here.
That said, I did spend the day before wandering about and spent the better part of the afternoon in Ueno. While waiting for my friend to finish work I went into the museum and absolutely fell in love with the building. There’s something about buildings that are used for museums. They are so old looking (even if they’ve been renovated) and the high ceilings, hard floors, really nice stair cases, little alcoves and large gallery rooms all just call out to me. There’s also the subdued lighting most museums opt for which I find quite relaxing and the fact that people are generally fairly quiet in museums. They are a lovely place to spend a few quiet hours even before you look at the exhibits.
I will say that you need to get there early enough to go into the gardens because they are gorgeous. They close the garden at 4 even though the museum is open until 5, and so I only had a little bit of time in the gardens before I had to leave but I’m really glad I got to go in. As for the museum, I loved going through the building that had the Chinese exhibits, particularly the calligraphy section but once I got over to the building housing the Japanese exhibits I was just blown away by some of the displays.
Given I didn’t have a lot of time I didn’t pay the extra to go into he current special exhibit which is a shame because it looked kind of cool, but there was more than enough for me to look at just in the main section and I didn’t get to everything before I had to go.
Still, can’t complain about leaving the museum when I got to walk down the avenue looking at the cherry blossoms. Admittedly, they are on their last legs and you could kind of tell, but given I didn’t think they’d still be out at all when I arrived I’m thrilled that there were flowers to look at.
The food stalls were also really fun and I could have eaten literally everything. Unfortunately, we were in a little bit of a rush because we wanted to do that cliche tourist thing and take a paddle boat out onto the lake to look at the blossoms. And of course we wanted it to be swan shaped because why not.
I’m just going to point out the steering mechanisms in those boats are absolute rubbish so collisions are almost inevitable. That said, you can get right up next to the blossoms and really, given we were the last possible time slot for the day, the sun was setting and it was just silly fun.
Bit of shopping and walking around the area for a few hours before heading back to the apartment and it was just kind of a perfect day. Then I got sick, but I kind of expected that. I live in the middle of nowhere with very few people coming and going. I get sick every time I travel and I’ve kind of just accepted that. Still, today I am mostly recovered and ready to go so the plan is to hit Akihabara and then prepare for a trip down to Kyoto.
I probably won’t update again until after that but in the meanwhile I hope everyone is well and sorry I haven’t read all that many blog posts in the last few days.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James
