July 10 Weekend - Nippori & Euno Park

This week was pleasantly light in terms of our agenda. We basically stayed in most of the day on Saturday. We visited the Bellevue mall that is across the street from our house. Definitely a ladies focused mall, like it seems about 60% of shopping is in Tokyo, with another 20% focused on confused tourists. This leaves about 20% for us men with 9 story electronic stores, business suits, and Italian sports car shops. They did have a nice bookstore and some decent looking restaurants. Later in the day we charted out our next bike trip. We decided on Nippori and the Ueno Park area and made a promise to ourselves that we wouldn't forget anything this time!

We got up bright and early on Sunday. Water bottles filled, IPhone charged, camera charged, etc. (Quick side note: IPhone is weak, Android OS, in my opinion is superior, and with the broad array of device support I think will be a tremendous threat to Apple. Msft really missed the boat on the mobile market). One of the smartest things we bought prior to leaving the U.S. were some good carrying/saddle bags for the bikes. It's 100x better than biking with a backpack. We headed North, Northeast up to Nippori, which is an older side of town about 8-9km away from Akasaka (home). It's a calmer part of Tokyo, still quite a few people considering the size of the streets, but certainly less hustle and bustle. The streets were quite skinny there, with older houses.

While there we were able to stop at Ueno station and watch the Shinkansen (bullet train) pass below us - that was pretty cool. We also parked our bikes and went into this very old shopping area - basically street vendors with small store fronts. Here we walked the small shops, grabbed a couple of bites to eat and I bought two small wood pieces to add to my collection of Japanese wood art. For food we bought (my favorite) a single crochet, and then Sae bought some interesting candied potato item. While at the crochet place we saw one of the guys working that shop aggressively yell at a photographer/passer-by and (in angered Japanese) demand that he delete the pictures of the store he had just taken. It was rather odd, I haven't seen anyone be that aggressive in about 1.5 months and also the shop is a total dive, it wasn't even the best looking crochet on the street, so I'm not sure at all what he was keeping concealed in his gem of a store.

From there we biked down to Ueno park and an old site where a shogun had built a hall and a temple (I believe, and you can see a lot of details of this in the picture slide show). Ueno park is very big, a very nice place. It is a natural park, but also has multiple museums and shops on the outskirts. The national museum is there, the Tokyo zoo is there, etc. We're planning to take a separate day, go back, and hit both of those sites. According yo our Tokyo guidebook both of those are great places to see. We biked throughout the park, saw the end of an ice sculpture competition, rested at one of the many ponds, then decided it was time to head back south for home.

On the way home both our hands were hurting from the grips on our bikes, and the shifting of my gears had been getting progressively worse since our arrival. Knowing we had a Cannondale bike shop just a couple of blocks from the house we decided to drive straight there and check it out. I walked in for grips and a quick tune up, and walked out with grips, a quick tune up, and a ridiculously overpriced garmin edge 705 gps system for the bike. With good reason though! Sae and I, given our personalities, at times have strong feelings about our direction/navigation on our bike trips and good ol' Mr. IPhone just wasn't cutting it as a third party mediator - so we decided to upgrade to a professional mediator :-). It's pretty cool though, it comes with a heart monitor sensor and also a cadence monitor that attaches to you pedals and rear wheel - all this information is fed wirelessly to the unit on the handlebars. It also came with quite a bit of software for trip planning, exercise tracking, etc. We left our bikes at the shop that night as it began to rain while we were in there.

We finished the night and weekend with a great sushi dinner at, we're trying to make that our regular sushi spot; which is already paying off as they gave us an excellent complimentary squid dish for coming in again. We wouldn't be coming back next weekend as the following weekend we were headed Northwest for a long weekend up in the mountains site seeing and enjoying onsen with Sae's family.