We took the train to Ueno Park and we saw lots more cherry blossoms there! And there were a ton of people lounging around and eating. We wandered through there a bit until we stumbled into an area with lots of street food and souvenir shops. I got some candied grapes which were interesting; they just had a hard candy coating on them.
Then we continued walking to Asakusa, which is a district that's famous for Senso-ji, a Buddhist temple. It's also now a market area with a ton of tiny shops full of trinkets and small dessert type things. It was really cool to walk around and see all the things and all the people; lots of women were in traditional kimonos. We kind of rushed through the area though because we were hungry and we thought there would be a lot more food than just desserts.
So we left there after only about an hour and caught the metro back to Ueno Park just so we could get food from that street food vendor area we had previously explored. We got lots of food there: I got a spiraled-fried potato thing and then a chocolate covered banana with sprinkles, Matt had sausage, corn, and chicken (which turned out to be just chicken skin- weird), and Jack had octopus on a stick, a cherry blossom rice cake, and a turkey leg. The cherry blossom rice cake was yummy and different.
We wandered back through the trinket area where I bought a few souvenirs. These are really the first things that we've bought since we didn't want to be dragging things all around the world with us, but I'm planning to ship a package home in the next few days anyway so I figured now's the time to buy stuff and send it home.
Then we spent quite a bit of time wandering around an area called Ameyayokocho. There was just everything there: clothes, shoes, desserts, fish, fruit, bags, makeup, pretty much anything you could think of. We found an arcade and checked that out for a bit; it was pretty intense. There were a ton of games in there that I'd never seen or heard of before. Then Jack and I split a dessert titled "Hong Kong egglet", which was different. It was similar to a waffle but instead of squares it had lots of circular bubbles, then it was wrapped in a cone with ice cream, bananas, whipped cream, and sprinkles.
At this point we had done a ton of walking and were pretty tired so we caught the train back to the airbnb and just chilled for a bit. For dinner we went to a sushi place that had a conveyor built of different sushi options and you just grabbed plates that looked good to you. It was very different from anything I've experienced before, both in types of sushi and just the logistics of the place. I had some shrimp, and crab, and also tried some cuttlefish.
Before heading in for the night we decided to first check out the Golden Gai area, which is full of tiny tiny bars (a lot of them only fit about 5 or 6 people). There were a ton of them all crammed on these tiny, historic streets. A lot of them were themed as well, and some of them only served "regulars" . We didn't go in any of them because most of them charged a cover but it was really neat just to walk around and check it out.
Another big day in the books and I'm dog-tired. Night all!
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