A street vendor in Ueno last night

Yesterday, in celebration of the marginally mild weather (never ever thought I'd say that a ten degree day was pleasantly mild) I hit the streets with the excellent guidebook "Little Adventures in Tokyo: 39 thrills for the urban explorer" by Rick Kennedy. This little gem is a good book for jaded Tokyoites sick to death of the well-beaten track and looking for a little something unusual to do with their free time.

Yesterdays adventure was a 10 km walking tour through "Old Tokyo" - Sendagi, Nezu and Yanaka near Ueno, and took in a bunch of very cool old shopping lanes, temples, ice-cream shops and cozy streets full of ramshackle wooden houses that actually lean to one side! My co-adventurers, Christian and Yuiko met with me at around 12.30 pm at Sendagi (on the Chiyoda line) and after around five and a half hours of walking and only a few breaks, we found ourselves in a cool, dark, dingy little 3rd floor Irish pub called the Warrior Celt (complete with long, ginger-haired tattooed celt pulling beers) in Ueno at around 6 pm. So yeah, it was a pretty full afternoon. Damn those beers tasted good.

While Tokyo itself has been around a long time, the same can not be said of its buildings, thanks to the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and of course the US fire-bombings which scorched the city and killed more people than both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. It's always fascinating talking to older Japanese about their war experiences. Most of them were still kids at the time. They were all packed up and sent off to the country where they were not always any safer (as in Masahiro's sisters case - she was sent to her aunts house in Hiroshima and never seen again). Keiko has vivid memories of returning to the ruins of the family home in the autumn after the surrender, to find her whole neighbourhood a pile of burnt rubble covered in beautiful cosmos flowers.

There are, however, a few pockets of Tokyo that are older than the war and you can imagine what life was like back then, strolling down the lanes all cluttered with bicycles and signs and flower pots and little knick-knacks and statues and what-not, listening to the tofu sellers whistle. It was a great little tour.

Anyway, I have a pretty free week this week so who knows, this mythical-alternate-universe new look gallery page I keep speaking of may actually make an appearance soon, with a ton of pics from yesterday in one gallery. At least before Christmas anyway. And I think I will just have to put a paypal donation button on a sidebar somewhere. The google ads just aren't effective enough. No-one seems to want to check out whatever they are offering.... (myself included)