This day started off with a lie in. During this trip I’ve tried to avoid wasting
too much time in this way but with a busy few days it’s become an occasional necessity. My original plan was to spend a second
morning in Akihabara then meet Kyle in Asakusa.
Since I was feeling particularly tired, I skipped the first part of the
plan and head out to Asakusa after an extended sleep.
The Asakusa district is one of the places in Tokyo I love to
visit. Rehashing what I’ve written in
the blog for previous trips, its streets are a winding maze leading to the
Sensou-ji temple and a nice marketplace.
I had two objectives when visiting Asakusa this trip. The first was to find a set of wedding dolls
for my cousin who is getting married shortly after the UK. The second was to replace the worlds
unluckiest charm. The first August I
visited Kyle (back in 2012), he bought me a purple omamori from the
temple. Part of the reason for this is
that it’s a Buddhist temple so the omamori has a Buddhist swastika on it (Kyle,
as you already know, has a warped sense of humour). I carried it with me until
the August of the following year(2013) when it fell out of my jacket pocket
when I put my jacket in to the overhead storage locker on the plane (that must
have confused the crew when it turned up!).
During that trip I visited Asakusa again so I decided to buy a
replacement. About a month after my return
to the UK, I had that omamori in my bag at work. The omamori was subsequently destroyed when a
fire broke out at work. At that point I
did start to wonder if this was an “unlucky charm”, but I’m probably just being
paranoid. As for the second objective,
my plan was to look for a few different styles of wedding doll. I’d previously bought kokeshi dolls (wooden)
for friends who were getting married so I thought I’d go for a different style
if possible.
After the market, Kyle and I decided to explore a little
more of Asakusa. We eventually decided
that this wasn’t such a good idea as the days weather forecast could easily be
confused with that of Hell. We clearly
needed to get indoors. With that, we
decided to return to train station and head back. That wasn’t the end of the day’s
expedition. On the way back we decided
to explore Kita-Senju, another station on the Tsukuba Express line. Kita-Senju is two stops away from Asakusa (in
the direction of Tsukuba) and was therefore part of our journey back to Misato
(well via Minami-Nagareyama) anyway. It
should also be noted that Kita-Senju is in Tokyo Prefecture but outside of the
Tokyo Ward (the metropolitan area of Tokyo).
Arriving in Kita-Senju, we decided to check out the large
shopping centre next to the station.
Before exploring many floors of shopping (the centre is 9 floors) we
headed to the food court on the 9th floor as neither of us had had
lunch and our stomachs were starting to become a serious noise violation. As is the theme of most trips to Japan, I was
insistent on having Ramen (despite Kyle’s groans). After a particularly good ramen, I’d have to
say nicer than the ramen in Misato, Kyle grudgingly conceded that ramen was
indeed a good idea.
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| Tasty Ramen! |
With our stomachs full (and sufficiently fuelled) we set
about exploring the assorted floors of shops.
One of the floors had a Tokyu Hands store, providing me with the perfect
opportunity to stock up on stationary.
The stich line notebooks available in Japan (they have little spaces
along each horizontal line, breaking up lines in to “cells”) are very useful
for writing up notes in Japanese class as they provide the right amount of
horizontal space when writing Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana. In addition to this, B5 format notebooks are
popular in Japan and I find these to be the right balance between A4 and
A5. They are more convenient than A4 but
offer more space than A5. I also took
the opportunity to get a new 0.3mm mechanical pencil (I haven’t seen them at
stationary shops in the UK for a while but I have a massive box of 0,3 lead)
and some folder cases for A5 notebooks.
After we’d browsed enough, we decided to have a look at the
rooftop garden. I don’t exactly have a
head for heights but the views were spectacular and it was nice to visit such a
peaceful space.
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| The Rooftop Garden - With Mandatory View Of The Sky Tree |
With our exploration of Kita-Senju complete, it was time to
return to Misato where Yamashita San was coming round later in the evening.
Yamashita San had kindly offered to drive us to some of the outlying areas we
can’t normally visit so we needed to work out the details of the plan in the
evening. As Yamashita San was offering
us to much help, it was only fair that I supply the beer for the evening. Having a laptop with an HDMI port proved very
useful as we were able to check the route and destinations (via google maps) on
the big television. Unfortunately, using
it to show Yamashita San our hometown of Bradford made the poor man despair.
Tomorrow – road trip!
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