That's a more profound-seeming title than will actually describe this post, I'm pretty sure.
Sometime around the beginning of the month, I planned to meet up with one of my friends from the TEFL course, Mattia, in Ueno for the day. Unfortunately, due to my misremembering our agreed-upon meeting spot, we missed each other quite completely. Nonetheless, I wandered around the area for a while. I wandered through a little bit of Ueno Park, though not much of it.
I didn't see any particularly famous landmarks or any of the three museums that Wikipedia informs me reside there. (I did see the National Museum of Western Art, but only the outside of it.)
This is evidently more or less what I looked like:
My glasses change their tint based on sunlight, perhaps a bit excessively at times. I think it makes me look somewhat angry or foreboding in that photo. Go figure. Maybe I was also slightly ruffled that I'd been walking around looking for Mattia without success for a while. (Not that this was by any means his fault, you understand.)
This is a view alongside the park, though it is obscured by the "wall" or slope to our right, heading into the more city-like parts of Ueno.
Ueno, it turns out, hosts a thriving little market area not too far from the station; I've completely forgotten the name of it? I'm sure Wikipedia could tell me, but I'm feeling lazy. It features a lot of fresh fruit & produce shops, meats and grains, bags & leather products, sports-y clothes, and other miscellaneous micro-stores. The fruit was all prohibitively expensive, by the way, but it's good to know I can find it if necessary.
Hard to tell from this photo, but this is a bunch of English/Western tea, alongside some Skippy's peanut butter and whatever else. I was disappointed that none of the shops seemed to stock any chai tea.
The peanut butter, incidentally, was very expensive: I don't remember exactly how much, nor can I make it out from the photo here, but I'm sure it was at least $5 for one of those tiny containers. On that topic, this is a photo from a grocery store I found later:
That's right, ¥478 = $5.74 for one of those dinky things. I'm starting to wonder whether there's any money to made with a black-market peanut butter importing business. Probably not, because the Japanese aren't nearly so fond of the stuff as Americans, so far as I can tell.
That was in a grocery store that was quite large by this market's standards. Most of the shops looked like this:
That recessed "room" on the left? That's the entire store. Plus the goods that extend outward on tables between shops. You can see where the next shop begins to the side, sharing its left wall with this store's right wall.
Hmm, evidently I didn't take a lot of other photos from that area, which is kind of a pity, since I want one that captures the size and distribution of these shops more appropriately. Ah well.
This is the Ueno station:
And then this was just a picture of Takeshita Dori, the main stretch of Harajuku, on my way back:
More to follow, supposedly!
