Day 6: Ueno Park and Tokyo National Museum

We have now made it past the half way point of our time here in Tokyo. I do not believe we realized just how much energy is required for each outing from the get go. Now we are taking more time to think about just how far we are willing to go and if the effort is worth it. After the great success we had yesterday breaking the day into two parts we decided this would work best for us from here on out.

Today we started off by heading to Ueno Park. This is the "museum district" of Tokyo. If they called their museums Smithsonian's then this would be D.C.. Ueno is only a few stops away so it did not take us long at all to get there. What did take us a while was finding food! Again, who's open and what can I eat this early in the morning. After walking a few blocks, we found a coffee shop and ordered off their breakfast menu. Chrissy got a ham, egg, and cheese sandwich (this was basically last night's pizza inside bread this time). Kyle got, get this, a chilly dog! This was one of five choices on the breakfast menu which included another non-chilied hot dog! By the way, iced tea here is a whole completely different thing than what we are used to. For some reason we keep ordering tea thinking it is going to taste like it does back home. It does not...we need to stop...now.

After our breakfast we hit the pavement toward the park to find the National Museum. On our way there we discovered a smallish shrine and scoped it out.

Kyle looked everywhere for a sword but there was none around

There were some awesome vending machines near by. Chrissy got an iced hot chocolate (YUM!) and Kyle got some ice cream. The ice cream was sort of like an ice cream sandwich. Instead of the chocolate cookie it was surrounded by that crispy vanilla wafer cookie. It was really good. After our snacks we were ready to get moving so we could make it to the museum when it opened. As we went along we saw more cool stuff...

Lemon water is the best

We made it to the museum with a few minutes to spare so we sat out by the... let's call it a "reflection pool" until the museum opened. Once it opened we grabbed our tickets and headed in. Not long after we stopped to check out the map and realized that this was not just one museum but a complex of buildings that made up one big collection. Lucky for our feet, two of the building are currently closed for renovation. Wanting to see as much as we could we decided to pace our selves and go to the areas we wanted to see most first. The main building walked through the history of art in Japan. There were some really amazing pieces and we spent a few hours scoping out this one building.

In case you can't read that, this is a saddle

That huge thing in the back is a bow and the thing on the right is an arrow

There were a lot of extremely large scrolls that were displayed that we wanted to share. We figured the best way was to take a video of them so here are two of our favorite scrolls:




Next we moved on to the annex buildings but our dogs were barking and we did not see to much that interested us so we moved on to the gardens. The garden was very nice as it contained several tea houses that had been donated and imported from around Japan.

After our garden stroll we were officially done with our interest in art for the day and decided it was time for some food and entertainment. Coming up in part 2: Sushi on the move, watching for splashes, and a man made island adventure!