Today Leona and I started by visiting the Tokyo national museum. It was different to other museums I’ve visited. Most cases had only one or a few items inside. Other places give you a number of items so you get a broad overview of the range. Each item was superb. For instance, there were only a few kimonos (they are changed so that they reflect the season), but the workmanship of each was superb, and I could have viewed them for a long time. However, it would have been nice to see how kimonos change throughout the year.
There were many more items associated with the samurai, including their armour,
whistling arrow
and swords. Most of these were unsheathed and weren’t able to be photographed, but this one was.
By lunchtime there were an enormous number of people at the museum and it was difficult to see things. There were gardens associated with the museum, but we were both disappointed with them. However, as we went through the Ueno park, which surrounds the museum, zoo and gallery… we saw this incongruous sight. The avenue we were walking through was of cherry trees that are used to identify cherry blossom season in Tokyo. This tree had cherry blossoms. It also has an American totem pole behind it!
We then caught trains to asakusa where we found a dumpling/yum cha type restaurant and had lunch. We then hurried across the bridge to the boat, where we were very lucky to secure two tickets on the boat which was about to leave (outside it had said none were available). As we were the last on board, we had the worst seats, so we didn’t have much of a view as we went downriver to the harbour.
But we were on a very impressive looking boat!
We then walked to the monorail and passed a Statue of Liberty (one of three in Japan - this one commemorates the friendship between Japan and France).
The monorail trip goes around the harbour and over the very high bridge you can see in the last two pictures. To make it down to land level after the bridge, the monorail does a complete loop, making it a spectacularly impressive ride. We then changed trains to go home.
No comments:
Post a Comment