Tokyo Trip, Day 2

As stated in the post for day one of my expedition through Tokyo, Japan with my sister (B) and her husband (G), we stayed up late talking the first night so we woke up late Saturday and started our travels about 1230 in the afternoon. Hungry, we tried a place nearby that is called Jonathans but is similar to Denny’s back in the States. Unfortunately it was full and we’d have at least a half hour wait before even getting seated so we decided to go to the next location on our trip to eat. The location was heralded as a nice little street full of cafes near a lovely little park locals gathered in to relax away from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. The street started out as a street of cafes and we picked a café that served Japanese style Italian food. I got a delicious cheesy spaghetti and I forget what the others got but we all loved our brunches and ate in the patio watching the people passing on the street. Eventually we had to get up though and we followed the street until it turned into a shopping street where I found a kind of funky native Australian store. Eventually the street ended in the park which turned out to be a large public park developed around a small lake. In the lake were paddle boats you could rent for a few hours, some shaped like normal paddle boats with no roof while others were shaped like larger than life swans and held two people. Instead of renting a paddle boat we decided to follow the lake and see what else the oases of nature had to offer before returning to the busy streets again. Turned out that the park was a cultural focal point on the weekends when artists of every type set up to create their art, sell it at a makeshift art faire, or earn a little money for entertaining like the jugglers or the violinist. A popular place to walk dogs, I was impressed with the artist who had the idea to sell hats for dogs as well as a few jewelry makers selling their wares on tables or carefully organized tablecloths on the ground along the sidewalks. After an hour or more we reached the end of the park and had to head back to the busy streets of Tokyo. However, before we got back on the train we each got a Japanese version of the crepe. Usually fruit and cream or ice cream wrapped in a thin but sweet pancake, the Japanese crepe is an excellent dessert or mid-afternoon snack and I was quite happy with my strawberry/banana/cream version before getting on the busy train.
Our next stop of the day was supposed to be a train station close to four large shrines. We walked around a lot looking for those shrines but never found them. Eventually we gave up and walked down a well lighted outdoor mall looking for food only to find a small temple surrounded by family graves. In the States a family grave likely brings to mind a tomb or building where the urns of family members are kept. In Japan a family grave means a single monument with wooden plaques (similar to human sized tongue dispensers) with the person’s name written elegantly in kanji down the plaque. I’m not sure if the urns were in the monument but my guess is that the graves were more of a place to remember the dead than visit them as many Americans like to do. We wandered around the temple for a few minutes and took pictures of the statues but we were hungry. We didn’t find food in that mall/street (or as the guide books call it: an “arcade”) so we headed back to our hostel, got food at a convenience store again and went to our room to watch a few episodes of Castle, one of my favorite television shows that they hadn’t tried yet.