Surprise rainy day visit to Institute for nature study
Japanese weather reports cannot be trusted. Last night I was planning my day, and checked the weather, bit of cloud, no rain, sunny periods. This morning I woke up, raining. No hiking today then.
Actually the tv weather in Japan is extremely and ridiculously detailed and complex. It involves hour by hour breakdowns of everything, including wind, rain, temperature, smoke, pollution, pollen, snow, leaf color, volcanic activity, earthquake likelihood. But then they overlay arrows and graphs that show you absolute change per hour, e.g. +5 knots wind speed, +220 lumens solar radiation etc. The arrow colors seem to range in intensity from yellow to red to blue to green to red again back to yellow and then finally grey.
A south east facing blue arrow is bad news, a volcanic eruption and change in wind speed is imminent!
Then they overlay onto that a relative % change per hour, e.g. temperature +3% from previous hour. Then they show graphs. Then they smooth the graphs with multiple logarithmic and quadratic overlays, then they compare to the same day last year and the mean deviation per hour for the previous decade, and the previous Japanese era. But still it rained all day despite the forecast showing no rain.
I have backup plans in case of rain, today I enacted backup plan 3c, which was to go to to an urban research forest near Meguro. It has a small entry fee and I had the entire place to myself. Parts were closed due to typhoon. I have no idea how such a closure could possibly be required.
When I woke the girl up at the entrance to pay my fee, she handed me all the usual paraphernalia I dont want, maps, 3 receipts stapled together, an explanation of the closure, an explanation of the price increase due to tax, and a pink ribbon with a safety pin on it. I assumed I had just donated to AIDS research. Despite all my assurances that I did not want any of that stuff, she was not taking no for an answer, so I took it all and shoved it in my damp pocket and went into the forest. I am deathly afraid of pins so there was no way I was going to pin it to myself. Anyway I digress.....
The forest was a forest, a couple of lakes, gravel paths etc. This is not a garden, they leave it wild to research forests in urban settings, a bit like the traffic institute art exhibition.
That is all quite boring, but then I left.
So I walk out the same way past the same girl who appears to be asleep again, and start wandering in the rain back down the main road. I hear yelling. She is chasing me down the street waving a pink ribbon. I already bought a damn ribbon leave me alone! I stopped and she caught up, in the rain, trying to cover her head with her hands. Her panicked and exasperated rantings in Japanese were all about the ribbon, I pulled my one out of my pocket and she snatched it! Then there was all kinds of relief in her voice and bowing. Thats when I worked it out.
They have x number of ribbons at the ticket gate, they collect them when you leave. At the end of the day if they are missing a ribbon, someone is dead inside the forest. So there you go, I nearly caused a helicopter rescue mission to find me inside a forest in the middle of Tokyo all by not knowing I needed to return my AIDS ribbon.
It is raining on the streets of Meguro.
This is what most of the Institute for urban development of forest walking paths and associated tree related infrastructure cultural zone looks like.
There are a few ponds, with dead trees in them.
2nd day in a row of being told I cant access a path. I want my $3 entry fee back!
This is a different pond to the other pond, but also features a dead tree.
After handing back my all important pink ribbon it was time to head back through Meguro and look for a drain.
Here it is! The famous cherry blossom sewer drain. It goes for about a km and ends up at the hipster location of NAKA-MEGURO.
The cherry blossom storm water channel is soon to be the home of a new rubbish incinerator, look how pretty it is!
Earlier in the day I thought it might just not quite rain enough for me to even get wet, but by now I was getting wet. People were looking at me like I am an idiot, they are 100% correct.
This is kind of the other end of the cherry blossom toxic sludge outlet.
Except then when you cross over into MECHA MEGA GURO there are even more blossomless trees. Along this section are all the little boutiques that 'top x lists of y things to do in Tokyo' like to go on about.
Now that I was fully saturated, I decided to walk via the upmarket area of Daikan-Yama (also popular with blogologist list makers) to Ebisu. Ebisu is a huge station complex, many shops, but most importantly, Tokyo Soup Stock. As always I got the 2 soup combo. One is pumpkin, the other is fish flavoured root vegetables with feathers. According to the weaher man, its not raining now. He is still wrong.
Eating pasta in Shin-Koiwa
It was still raining when it was time to head out for dinner. My challenge was to go somewhere in Tokyo I had not been before. That part is easy, Tokyo is the largest city in the world and despite all the times I have been here I doubt I have even seen 10% of it.
The hard part was to find somewhere that would have places to walk and look at things that are undercover. I headed to Google maps and started scrolling. Ueno is in the Eastern part of the centre of Tokyo, so instead of moving closer to the centre, I went further east, across some rivers and eventually ended up at Shin-Koiwa station, which has a traditional undercover shopping street running off of it.
Getting to Shin-Koiwa is easy, it is on the Sobu line, the shopping street is right across the slippery rain soaked road from the station.
The rain meant that people were riding their bikes through here to avoid getting wet, while still carrying an umbrella and using their phones all at once. Very dangerous.
I decided I best find some dinner and wait the rain out. No jokes at all in todays update, just the facts. Meanwhile, right now, its stopped raining.
Now to plan what to do tomorrow.
Here it is in all its glory. A place to escape the rain. Most of the shops were still open, and most of the shops were shops, not old closed down shops or storage spaces.
I selected a pasta shop for dinner. They only serve one kind of pasta dish. They grind their own meat and dry their own pasta on site. I liked the look of it. I was hoping they might feed an entire animal into the grinder, but unfortunately, they did not.
And I liked the pasta, a lot. A great thing in casual Japanese restaurants is the size selection. It is quite common to be able to select from S, M, L, XL, XXL when ordering your meal from the ticket dispensing machine. Yes this may be a traditional old fashion all made on site pasta shop, but you still have to order from a machine. No one ever talks in Japan.
The back streets on the far side of the station were also quite interesting. The usual pachinko parlours, massage parlours, just a lot of parlours really.
I have no idea why, but Shin-Koiwa was advertising these ugly MonChhiChi characters everywhere. There was even a MonChhiChi park somewhere. Imagine your main claim to fame being these ugly bear creatures with their name containing consecutive h's.
I like it when train platforms have a view. Not of the girls, of the shops behind it. Although thats some impressive shoes they are wearing to look slightly taller than 3 feet 0 inches.
Last photo for this evening, just because I had not taken many photos, the impressive line up of food places inside the barriers at the Ueno station. There are at least ten places I would eat at inside the station, including cake and crepe shops, as well as at least 5 bookshops, and somewhere you can buy live crabs to take on the train with you for entertainment.