Exploring the neighborhood

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our second day in Japan, this post is a day late,nbut with the difference most of you are reading this on I doubt you are awaiting eageerly for these updates.

Firstly, any pictures in today's post were not taken by me. My camera uses a full size SD card, and my tablet has a micro SD card slot,and we don't have the appropriate cord. But no worries we are in Japan, and I still need scour Akihabara fo hobby stuff, and Akihabara as I understand used to be the densest electronics shopping neighborhood in the world.

Anyways, we woke up a little early, for a vacation day, but it gave us time to explore the day. We did some preliminary research on what to do for the day and checked out of the room (they were Changing us from a smoking room to non). We went into the train station for a quick breakfast, and of course Laura needed coffee. The place we went to had a preset menu with English and pictures which is pretty common for the ease of tourists. Toast and eggs, and yogurt nothing exotic. We then wandered over to he Ueno Park ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueno_Park ). Apparently it is pretty old and was built on the whim of one of the Shogun, like most parks in he Old World, though this had a lot more spiritual relevance, due to the Japanese not being civilized to Christianity, and still worrying about demons and such in the 1620s.

And then when the Japanese opened up and saw how great and advanced the west was they desperately tried to catch up by building museums and a zoo in the park. All this makes the park an ideal spot to start our trip.

We walked around spotting the zoo and the temples and shrines, which you will have pictures of later. There also was a bonsai expo? Or maybe competition, I don't know I can't really kanji so all of this is just guessing on my part.

After that we meandered through Ameyoko ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameya-Yokochō ). And on I Akihabara, getting our bearings on where train lines and rivers are.

For lunch we stopped at an izakaya, which was super authentic, but ultimately bewildering because we don't have a "fixer" and subsequently have no idea what is going on on the menu. We ordered sliced pork and chicken meatballs, and Laura got a very fishy miso. I don't think she was expecting half a fish bones n all in the soup but that's what it was. The pork and chicken were delicious though, and the beer was cheap.

We made y back to our hotel, figured out what to eat for dinner and started walking again. We walked bout 20 minutes to he Asakusa neighborhood for diner and on wandered around that neighborhood, before returning to the Ueno area for beer and small plates.

While reading about Ueno and Asakusa we learned that these are two of the worst neighborhoods of Tokyo. Which is amazing, because it felt safer than. Many Neighborhoods I have wandered in South America and Europe. I think that in general crime is nearly non existent in Japan, so the existence of the homeless squatters in he park dramatically skews the numbers. The homeless in the park weren't overtly crazy like many in the parks and busses of the States, so we were surprised to learn of this areas bad reputation.

This is it for the day, turns out typing on my tablet is exhausting, fighting the knock-off Android dictionary is a losing battle. I apologize for any autocorrect mistakes made.