Well, i went to tokyo again…. there was an exhibit at the Ueno Royal Museum of salvador dali’s art – the largest exhibition in japan by a single foreign artist this year. i figured i’d better go since it happened to be so close. here’s a link to the museum’s pages on dali: dali2006. since i have two days off at a time i needed to find something else interesting to do in tokyo so i decided to go to disneyland!! hey, why not – i’m here, i might as well go. :-) so i took the overnight bus tuesday night (the 21st) that left from nagoya at 10:30pm and i arrived in tokyo at about 6am. not exactly the smoothest ride, but at half the price of the shinkansen it can’t be beat. i got to disneyland at about 7am and there was already a line to get in!! japanese people are crazy about disney (and other things too). i waited about 30mins. to buy my ticket and then waited another 20 or so to get in. people actually ran at top speed to get to the attractions in the back. i took a nice easy walk to the nearest restaurant to eat breakfast and drink some coffee. then i wandered around the park for a bit and was just blown away by the number of people. i went on 5 rides – one i only had to wait two minutes, two were about 20 minutes, one was about and hour and 15 minutes and the last one was about an hour and a half!! that really sucked… and biggest suck of all – space mountain was closed!!! yargh!!!!!!!!
So after my glorious time spent at Disneyland, i decided i needed a little bit of a break from screaming children, rampant capitalism and all things plastic. so i went two stops north of ueno on the JR Yamanote line to a little town called Nippori. They have quite a large cemetery and some of the town is still laid out like a traditional japanese town with narrow streets and really old looking houses. the cemetery is home to some really old graves as well as an awful lot of very vocal crows. which are also huge. and scary. and cool. all at the same time.
After my little trip to the cemetery i walked back down to ueno. then hopped on the train to go to asakusa (where i had been on my last trip too). i had booked a cheap hotel there – a capsule hotel!! yeah!!! here’s their website: capsule hotel. i walked around a bit in the evening and took pictures and had mushroom spaghetti for dinner. and beer too. called it an early night though since the bus wasn’t particularly restful the night before.
I got up pretty early the next day (thursday the 23rd) and headed back to ueno to go to the museum. and guess what – there was a line to get in. i waited about 20 minutes to buy my ticket and then another 30 to get in the front doors. it was four or five people deep in front of every painting (welcome to sardine town) so i took my time and wiggled my way to the front. and then proceeded to take mini-steps to the side until i finished one wall. it was a really excellent show though. i spent about 2 hours there. and also bought the catalogue for the show – you can look at it next time i see you. ;-)
I continued from there just down the way to check out the Tokyo National Museum. Their site. Ueno park has a bunch of museums as well as a pretty famous zoo (there are some pandas there). And I know you’ll be schocked, but there was a line to get into this museum too…. tokyo nat’l museum is actually four buildings, and only one of them had a line, so i guess i lucked out that time. it was really nice to see so many people interested in art, but i must confess that i prefer the empty museums in the states.
Whew! I took a lot of pictures… after ueno i went to ginza to a small art gallery and then proceeded to shinjuku where my bus was leaving from. ate some dinner and killed some time in a bookstore. read an english manga – ‘death note’. it was pretty good! then i ambled out to the bus stop and found my lovely bus.
No wonder you looked tired!! Vacation exhaustion after just two days! What’s up with you – I thought you loved It’s A Small World. Or was that just me?? :-)