Ueno

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We’ve been working a lot of overtime recently, so we haven’t had much in the way of energy or time to write. Six day weeks are pretty tiring, but the rewards should make up for it (when we get paid in September). We’ve been keen to see The Mummy Returns for a few weeks (especially so since we bought The Mummy on video and watched it a couple of times), so we resolved to see it on our day off, Tuesday. To this end, we decided to take a trip into Tokyo, and go to Ueno, the cultural hub of the city (or so the guide book says). The local theatre in Matsudo is pretty shocking – 1700 yen for a ticket, and the cheap bastards use video projection (badly aligned and shaky) instead of film. And the screen are small, and the sound isn’t very good. We’d heard that in Ueno the theatres are real theatres – at least 3-400 seats per cinema, comfy and good quality.

We ventured out from our Kogane flat at around 12, having slept late and eaten vegemite on toast for breakfast (many thanks to our parents for sending it over). We stopped at the McDonalds in our local department store to share a Big Mac, just to fortify ourselves for the journey. Our tekeis (monthly train passes) had expired the day before, so we had to spend close to 20,000 yen on train tickets. We get reimbursed by Nova for our monthly train passes, which is just as well as Matt’s is $160NZ, and Debbie’s is about $130. All-day train passes for Tokyo cost $15 NZ, which is pretty cool, as you can jump on and off as many times as you can be bothered, and there are lots of places on the Yamanote loop line worth looking at, Ueno being one of them. So, after a brief visit to the bank to get out some cash for the day, we boarded a train and braved the heat to get to Ueno.

Ueno station is big. Very big. And it’s under construction, so half the signs are covered or taken down at the moment, which makes things fun. Actually, the signage in train stations (in Tokyo and Chiba at least) is very good – lots of stuff in English, fairly clear markings. We just had to figure out which exit we wanted, and which of the 22 platforms we should go to when we wanted to go home. We had a guidebook with us, which recommend the Keisei exit, but that was ‘under construction’, so we left via the closest exit we could find (after having consulted a handy map in the trainstation). The theatre is (rather conveniently) on the park side of the station, so we headed that way. Ueno has a huge park next to the station, which contains about 6 museums of various kinds, and 20 or 22 temples, as well as a small lake and lots of trees. We figured we could happily kill some time wandering around the park going ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaahhhh’ and taking photographs until the movie started. We crossed the crowded street, and fought our way up to the theatre to check the times. Everything was written in Japanese, but it didn’t take us long to work out from the lack of The Mummy Returns posters that the movie we wanted to see wasn’t on. Harumph. It had been out for about 6 or 7 weeks here, but that means nothing to us – we wanted to see it, and we considered it extremely inconsiderate (if not outright rude) for the theatre to have finished playing the movie before we got to see it. Had we been able to speak any amount of useful Japanese, we would have had stern words with the manager!

Thwarted (temporarily) in our plans, we regrouped and had a strategic planning session. Shinkjuku, a thirty minute ride on the Yamanote line from Ueno, has lots of movie theatres. This we know, having seen them some weeks before on an earlier excursion. We reasoned to ourselves that perhaps, being thwarted at one theatre, we might yet find success at another. Hmmmm. In the meantime, we resolved to investigate the Ueno park, greatly encouraged by the guidebook’s glowing recommendations. It was hot as we entered the park – a large sign on a neighbouring building proclaimed the temperature to be 34 degrees, but once we were under the canopy of the trees, the temperature dropped. There’s an old temple built on a bridge across a lake, so to this we headed as a first attraction. It is possible to hire rowboats and pedal boats on the lake, though we thought it would be too hot in mid-summer for such shenanigans. The temple (and the lake surrounding it) was beautiful, much like our local temple but grander in scale and vastly more populated with Caucasian tourists. It felt strange to be seeing so many white people, after seven weeks of life in the suburbs. I found myself wondering how many were residents, and how many were tourists in Tokyo. We took a few photos, and wandered slowly around the temple grounds. Inside, there was a huge gong with a rope hanging down, which we rang loudly (and reverently I assure you). The whole atmosphere of the temple was very peaceful and beautiful. Many of the Japanese people who came through the temple while we were there looked to be tourists themselves, carrying cameras and video cameras and foregoing religious rites in favour of photography.

We headed toward the lake with the aforementioned pedal boats, and discovered that many of them were shaped like giant white swans. Unable to resist the cuteness of them, we handed over 700 yen for half an hour in a pedal powered swan. It was very relaxing and romantic, and not so hot out on the lake, so we pedalled and drifted and confused the local ducks. A few Japanese couples and families were at play upon the lake, as were two lads who looked to be out ‘cruising for chicks’. A strange thing to be doing in a pedal swan, but what the hey. It was very soothing, and we took several pictures from our mid-lake position. However, as our time grew short, we grew hungry. We pedalled back in, and strolled to a park exit, reasoning that any exit would be near a McDonalds. Sadly for us, this was not so, as we exited on the Highway/Business District side of the park, and had to circumnavigate the park until we hit the shopping district. We snacked, and visited a couple of shops – the Hyper-Consumer-Disney-Store, and HMV. We bought an Arthurian Eeyore (damsel in distress) for Sam, scoured the music store for Eddie Izzard (unsuccessfully) then headed back to the train station. We made for Harajuku, where we shopped for videos and CDs, and ate dinner at Sizzlers. It was expensive, but the food was great, and extremely rejuvenating. After a long day, we decided to wend our way homeward, many thousands of yen poorer, but with photos and fond memories and several videos and CDs. It was a good day off, perhaps not as relaxing as we had hoped, and without movie watching as a feature, but it was good.


Debbie looks out over the pond at the bustling Metropolis of Ueno.	Matt poses before the same pond, upon which a temple is built (on a bridge).

The temple interior.	Pedal Swans - cruising for chicks.