JordanPachal.ca ...Just Me, Myself and I...

Day 6 - July 26...Today was going to be a bit slower of a day as we didn't have any plans until later in the evening when we were going to go to the huge fireworks festival.  We spoke to Tanveer and June in the morning and decided we would meet at the Imperial Palace so that we could go through the gardens there.  The day started off with Michael not feeling well due to the amount of sun we got the day before at Disneyland so he stayed at the hotel to relax.

Jaime and I caught the train to Tokyo Station and started heading off to the Palace.  Jaime and Michael had been here before, but as this was my first time in this area I was shocked at how dead the Tokyo core was after being completely surrounded by people for 5 days prior.  The only explanation is that most people spend most of their lives in the Train/Subway stations since you can never move around in them.

As we neared the Imperial Palace, we were filling our water bottles up at a fountain and hear "Which part of Canada are you from?"  I realize that I have a Canadian tag on my shoulder bag I take with me during the day, but I don't actually think that people pay attention to it.  It was a group of 4 young guys who were from Edmonton and they were on their way to Kyoto later in the day.  We continued on our way to find Tanveer and June.  We saw them at the end of a path and waved them down.  I walked over to the Imperial Palace and got the best picture I could as you cannot get very close to the palace regularly.  The Palace only opens it's doors to visitors twice a year, on December 23, the Emperor's birthday and January 1, New Year's Day.

We continued to the Imperial Garden and found it a few minutes down the street from the Palace.  The garden itself at this time doesn't have a lot of colour.  It was mainly trees, shrubs, ponds and paths that would their way through some of the wall sections of the Palace.

After a couple hours of being in the Tokyo/Imperial Palace area we decided to make our way to Akiharaba to check out the electronics district.  We got off the station and took in the sights and made our first electronics store stop at a "SoftMap" store.  It was 7 complete floors of just electronics.  We wandered around floor one for a few minutes and then made our way to floor 7 which is where the video games, toys and movies were.  We didn't see a huge amount of different items that we see at home and the items themselves were just as much or higher in price than our North American counterparts, so we didn't make any big electronic purchases.

After building up an appetite wandering through the electronics we decided to find a place for a meal.  We found a building which contained a couple floors of restaurants so we went in and chose a Katsu restaurant (breaded and fried meat).  It was a bit challenging for Tanveer as all the items except for one contained pork and his religion doesn't allow for pork consumption.  The meals we had however were delicious and were filling enough to get us through the remainder of the day.  We also met a couple who chatted with June for a little while and were nice enough to help point us into the direction of the fireworks.

We realized after eating that it was getting late and we were running out of time to make it to the fireworks so we rushed out of the restaurant and made our way to the train.  We were unable to find a phone at Akiharaba station within a decent amount of time, so we hopped the train and called Michael from Ueno station which is where we would transfer to go to Asakusa (again, yes we are ending up there a lot).  Jaime called Michael at our hotel and he was on his way.  We hopped on a train to Asakusa, which was getting quite busy due to the amount of people flooding into Asakusa for the fireworks (last year an estimated 900,000).

When we arrived in Asakusa, Jaime stayed at the Train station to wait for Michael, and Tanveer, June and myself went onto the street and entered the crowd.  We were on one of the major streets and it was full of people as far as you could see forward.  The crowd kept moving forward bit by bit, and we could hear the fireworks going off, but we were surrounded by buildings so we couldn't see anything.  Around 20 minutes into waiting in the crowd, we finally started to understand what was going on, the giant mass of people was getting split into sections and led across the bridge group by group.  We ended up being group 20.  It took about 10 minutes to get across the bridge, so that was the main portion of the fireworks that we were able to see.  It didn't bother us though, as the experience of being in a mass of hundreds of thousands of people was more of a rush than the fireworks themselves.  I still ended up being able to snap around 400 pictures so far this day by putting the camera on the continuous shooting mode and holding the button down while the fireworks went off.  In the crowd we were standing beside a Norwegian girl who was in as much awe as we were with the whole experience.

After we had our turn on the bridge, we then had to try to find our way back to Asakusa to meet back up with Jaime and Michael.  We stated we would meet them at 8:30pm, however it was almost that time already and we still had to navigate back through streets we had not been on before, and get through crowds of thousands of people.  After being directed through detours on the streets we got to the next major bridge, which although it had lots of people on it was moving at a quicker pace due to the fact the fireworks had just ended.  We crossed the bridge, ducked through a couple side streets to try to pass some of the crowd and met Jaime and Michael at about 9:00pm in front of the station.

We got onto the train towards Ueno to start heading home.  In Ueno station while walking up the stairs I looked to the side and made eye contact with the same girl who was crossing the bridge with us during the fireworks.  After our initial shock that we were able to cross paths again after that experience we talked for a few minutes.  We were all amazed at how efficient the whole night went, with that many people being able to cycle through the fireworks and the efficiency of the trains still with this many people using them.  She told us that she was going to be in Japan for a while, however in a few days she was meeting up with a friend from Japan who was going to do the planning from that point on.  We invited her to come with us to Akihabara, but she declined as she had just arrived that day and had been up for about 24 hours and needed sleep.

Jaime and Michael decided to go home after the fireworks, while Tanveer, June and myself continued on to see Akiharaba at night.  We wandered around Akiharaba for a while, had ice cream at McDonalds, which we found quite interesting as in the eating area almost everyone was using a PSP or Nintendo DS handheld gaming system.  We also went into a couple arcades although nothing else was open and there were no lights or anything so we got bored very fast and decided to go home.  We all went on the JR Line together, my stop was first so I departed and Tanveer and June continued home.

- Jordan