DAY 02-03: SENSO-JI TEMPLE & AROUND UENO
Friday, December 27, 2019
SENSO-JI TEMPLE
(29MAY2019)
Out of all the places I've come to in Japan so far, excluding the ones that I've yet to see in the Spring season, which I've never experienced yet, Senso-ji Temple was my most instagrammable place overall. All the reds in the background is a feast for my eyes because it is so alive and it screams culture.
We did one tourist-y thing apart from posing for photos. It's called OMIKUJI, where you get to draw your written fortune. What you do is you drop a hundred yen in and pray for your wish, then shake the box full of sticks with written numbers. Draw a stick and find the drawer with the same number that you got and then read your fortune. Easy peasy. When you draw a good fortune, you can take the paper home. I lost mine. Bummer. If you draw a bad fortune, don't be sad, because you can leave that unfortunate paper and tie it down here in Japan so it wouldn't follow you home. It was so interesting. I used to see tied paper in hangers around Japan and I don't know the meaning behind it and after doing the Omikuji, I was a little bit knowledgeable than I was before doing it.
You can watch me draw my fortune on my vlog around the 3:40 mark. A little warning though, it is a really shaky vlog.
After doing the Omikuji, we roamed around and watched other tourists do other tourist-y things like light an incense or pray inside the temple, which I didn't try to do. It's not that I didn't want to but I was feeling shy, thinking that I might do something wrong.
We did that for most of the day and we roamed around until we got to Don Quijote, which is just around the area. If there's a Donki here in Manila, I would have gone there everytime. There were lots of random stuff in there, from food to cosmetics to small things that I don't even know if I really needed but just feel like buying.
I guess that's it for Senso-ji. Pretty boring but it's one of the places I enjoyed during my vacation in Japan.
You can watch me draw my fortune on my vlog around the 3:40 mark. A little warning though, it is a really shaky vlog.
After doing the Omikuji, we roamed around and watched other tourists do other tourist-y things like light an incense or pray inside the temple, which I didn't try to do. It's not that I didn't want to but I was feeling shy, thinking that I might do something wrong.
We did that for most of the day and we roamed around until we got to Don Quijote, which is just around the area. If there's a Donki here in Manila, I would have gone there everytime. There were lots of random stuff in there, from food to cosmetics to small things that I don't even know if I really needed but just feel like buying.
I guess that's it for Senso-ji. Pretty boring but it's one of the places I enjoyed during my vacation in Japan.
UENO PARK, SHIBUYA CROSSING & HACHIKO STATUE
(30MAY2019)
On our third day, we were already super tired from all the walking of the previous days and I thought I might not be able to walk out of the hotel on that day but okay, I still managed to pick myself up for yet another long day of walking.
Ueno park, in my imagination, would be a lot more beautiful in the spring time, because in the summer, it's just like any other park there is.
Since Ueno Park is big and there are a lot of things to do and museums to go to, we chose one museum we can spend our time in. We had a lot of choices, most of which are closed that day and we ended up going to National Museum of Nature and Science. I would have loved to explore all of the museums in Ueno Park just because Japan is great at preserving the old and the new and it's a great way to learn about tradition and history but our time wasn't enough, sadly.
We went to Ameyoko Market so early in the morning and most of the stores were still closed so we decided to stroll Ueno first and then came back by midday to eat street foods and roam around the famous market.
Candied fruits are like the thing in asian countries and I've tried the candied strawberry in Taiwan and was hoping to find one in Japan. I don't know if they actually have it, then I saw some strawberries from a distance and initially thought it was the candied one but it was just strawberry on a skewer. Even so, the strawberries were sweet and huge and just plain delicious. That was my most memorable experience in Ameyoko.
My worst food experience in Ameyoko was thinking that the shawarma would be perfect for my taste! Shawarma is my absolute favorite food to go whenever I'm at the mall and here I was thinking that the lettuce would be the same as the lettuce we have back home. Imagine my surprise when I first took a bite and discovered that the lettuce tasted like cabbages! I hate cabbage so I was devastated that my beloved shawarma would taste just like that. Oh well, I got a boyfie with a big stomach so yuhhh.
If you look closely at the photo below, that was my happy face before plunging into that first bite of cabbage nightmare. (My eyes even started to get puffy already just by that first bite)
We were mostly pretty tired in the evening but we need to at least see Shibuya Crossing in action so we took that route on the way to the hostel.
It was kind of underwhelming to see the famous crossing. It. was. just. a. crossing. Girl, what did I really expect? So we each took turns crossing the pedestrian lane and took one picture of each other and that's it. At least we had a photo of us crossing the street to commemorate the famous pedestrian crossing in Tokyo.
After that, we passed by Hachiko statue and took photos with the most famous and loyal dog, Hachi. ❤️
P.S. I had a hard time finishing my past blog posts so I gotta finish them all now before 2020 or else I might never get the chance to write it down ever again. So yeah, all the posts before this and following this one are all backlogs. I may do a round up next year.
Since Ueno Park is big and there are a lot of things to do and museums to go to, we chose one museum we can spend our time in. We had a lot of choices, most of which are closed that day and we ended up going to National Museum of Nature and Science. I would have loved to explore all of the museums in Ueno Park just because Japan is great at preserving the old and the new and it's a great way to learn about tradition and history but our time wasn't enough, sadly.
We went to Ameyoko Market so early in the morning and most of the stores were still closed so we decided to stroll Ueno first and then came back by midday to eat street foods and roam around the famous market.
Candied fruits are like the thing in asian countries and I've tried the candied strawberry in Taiwan and was hoping to find one in Japan. I don't know if they actually have it, then I saw some strawberries from a distance and initially thought it was the candied one but it was just strawberry on a skewer. Even so, the strawberries were sweet and huge and just plain delicious. That was my most memorable experience in Ameyoko.
If you look closely at the photo below, that was my happy face before plunging into that first bite of cabbage nightmare. (My eyes even started to get puffy already just by that first bite)
We were mostly pretty tired in the evening but we need to at least see Shibuya Crossing in action so we took that route on the way to the hostel.
It was kind of underwhelming to see the famous crossing. It. was. just. a. crossing. Girl, what did I really expect? So we each took turns crossing the pedestrian lane and took one picture of each other and that's it. At least we had a photo of us crossing the street to commemorate the famous pedestrian crossing in Tokyo.
P.S. I had a hard time finishing my past blog posts so I gotta finish them all now before 2020 or else I might never get the chance to write it down ever again. So yeah, all the posts before this and following this one are all backlogs. I may do a round up next year.