After breakfast we returned to our room to have showers, and in Eli's case a bath, and then we headed out for our first taste of 'Hanami', cherry-blossom viewing festival/season. We ventured to Shinjuku Gyoen with about a million other people, and Iain successfully faced the scary lines and even scarier ticket machines to gain entry to the park. It seemed that this park was the place to be for hanami and we saw many mothers and children, families, grandparents, and after a while office workers on lunch breaks. The place was so crowded that even though it spans beyond visible range, there was barely a spot available next to any flowering cherry blossom tree. It was beautiful though, so many trees and they were basically all at full bloom, people taking photos everywhere, and everyone just relaxing, enjoying a magnificent (even at times hot!) day in the fresh air and then gorgeous views. Once again iain braved the language barrier and got us a lovely 'bento' lunch, consisting of various types of sushi, rice, pickled vegetables, and possibly egg?! But whilst Iain was proving his abilities to point and pay, Eli was suddenly overcome with attention and at one stage we had about 5 people surrounding us wanting to have a photo taken with Eli. Rachel was too scared of not getting Eli back from his admirers to take photos of the crowd, but it was still quite the experience. Eli unwillingly obliged and waited for them to finish man-handling him and taking photos after which Iain returned and we sat down and had a magnificent lunch under the non-existent shade of a flowering cherry-blossom tree adjacent to a lovely wide grassed area full of many other families.
After lunch Eli was wanting to get up and play with all the other kids, so being the rambunctious young thing he is, he just ran up to some other kids and started running after them. Some of the children were much more willing to play with Eli than others, but Eli wasn't put off and just kept chasing them :) this behaviour also led to more photos with strangers, some of whom spoke English and one who had even lived in Australia studying English, how fortunate we are that most Japanese people can speak English!
After all the fun and games we continued to walk around the park, stopping to take photos of more cherry blossoms and nice ponds/ducks/bridges and anything else that took our interest, then it was time to leave and find coffee to keep the adults going whilst the little one slept. Our afternoon ended up being a shopping adventure, where we went to the train station to figure out how to exchange our JR rail passes for actual tickets to get to Bessho Onsen the following day and then attempting to find a place where we could sit down for coffee to discuss which trains we then had to book in on. Coffee was easy to come by, a place to actually sit down and drink it was not. This wasn't really surprising considering that Tokyo is probably the most (?!) crowded city in the world and therefore space is at a premium, but considering how much Iain and I enjoy our cafe culture back home, it's quite hard to go without when on holidays. We did eventually find somewhere which gave us a seat and even a place to put the pram (next to the table!) whilst Eli slept, and the coffee was pretty good too!
We decided to walk back to the hotel after finalising our ticket purchases, but decided to go a different route to see more of the city; this choice was ultimately a good one, but it did lead us to getting back to the hotel relatively later than expected. Whilst walking Iain noticed a sign for 'Bic Camera' which is a very big electronics goods store in Japan, having a couple of things we wanted to buy we headed on over. After finding our goods in the multiple-storey shop, which in itself was quite a task, we bought our goods and left the store. Then we realised it was getting close to dinner, so Iain defaulted to google to help us find somewhere with Japanese food that was a bit more authentic that the fast-food Japanese we had the night before. This led us to a region not specifically a restaurant, where we ended up in a relatively small but actually quite large (for Tokyo) restaurant which looked after us very well, especially Eli. The people in the restaurant didn't speak much English and the menus were all in Japanese (completely understandable since it is Japan!), so one of the staff just asked if we wanted 'Sashimi'; knowing what it was Rachel asked for sushi instead, because of Eli, but we ended up with sashimi anyway. So that was one of our adventures for the night, the other was Sake, obviously not for Eli! It was good, but not overly interesting, but still another Japanese adventure ticked off our invisible list of things to do in Japan. Btw Eli ate the rice from the sashimi and was given a glass of orange juice. That was his first juice experience and quite a funny one too, he didn't look like he enjoyed it very much but kept going back for a little bit more... When we left the restaurant one of the staff gave Eli a 'transformers' mask. He loves the mask, calls it a hat, but wears it on his face and enjoys fogging it up with his breath. Rachel also accidentally stole a face washer from the restaurant, and feels very bad about it too!
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