Parks

One of the nicest things about travelling without a fixed itinerary is that you can take time for a nice relaxing walk in the local park if the weather and geography seem to suggest it. If you get a park that the people of the city actually use, it can be a nice way to catch a glimpse of what life is like in a foreign country. And, you get to see some pretty weird stuff too.

So far, we've taken two walks in large parks in Japan and here are some of the things we've witnessed:

• The end of a race (it was unclear as to how long it was, but I'd guess it was pretty long.)
• A group of four young gentlemen wearing masks and matching outfits filming themselves doing a dance routine. My guess was a game show demo tape.
• A Japanese mariachi duo. Guitar, pan flute, ponchos, singing a mariachi type song in Japanese. It was weird.
• A large group of people standing around clapping poorly in time to the music that the balloon animal creator had playing. It turns out, his balloon creations were pretty impressive. We walked by later when he was packing up and saw an ecstatic little girl carrying a balloon Minnie Mouse that was almost as big as she was.
• Japanese guys trying to skateboard. Again, not many places in Japan that have the space available to practice. What benches are available have arm rests and they have a habit of putting things that stick up off their handrails as well. So even though the guys looked to be in their 20's, their skill level was about that of the 10 year old who lives in our neighbourhood back home.

The first park we went to was the Osaka-Jo park and it was immaculate. It was pleasant to walk around and the people of the city obviously enjoyed using it as well. We saw lots of people walking or running, people practicing martial arts, kids practicing musical instruments, dog walkers, etc.

In the park in Tokyo, Ueno park, it's got a little more Tokyo-big-city influence to it. Still lots of people enjoying it, but it's definitely dirtier (my time spent in New York felt cleaner to some parts of this park). We've also seen some of Japan's homeless living here. But, they seem to be mostly left alone to do their thing and have some pretty permanent looking shelters set up. Even the gardeners seem to avoid conflict with them and just work around them. One of the people living there had even managed to set up a cook stove and kettle. I didn't see any of them begging for change and most of the Japanese people walking by just ignored them. My overall memory of the day was still pretty good, as we stumbled across an Irish pub at the train station on the way back from the park. But, perhaps we'll save the critique of their "Irish" pub for another post.