Well, Friday the 4th finally cleared up, weather-wise, and I got to go where I failed to get to on Thursday, which is just as well, given how much nicer the wather was on Friday! I’m breaking this day’s report in two parts, because I got so many great shots of blossoms in Sumida Park and Shinjuku Park, that I don’t want to make a boringly large single post!
I’ll start with Sumida Park, at the beginning of the day. I made it up to Oshiage, which is a part of town at the foot of the Tokyo Sky Tree Tower, which is so huge that pictures can’t do it justice! It’s over 640 meters tall which works out to just over 2080 feet! I didn’t go up to the observation decks on this day, that will be for another day, today was for cherry blossoms!
After a short quarter-mile walk towards the river, I reached Sumida Park, which basically has two spaces, a small plaza-like park, where lots of people were enjoying their “hanami”, a couple of shrines, and a long narrow walkway park on both sides of the Sumida River, each side stretching for about a kilometer, 0.6 miles.
I ended up walking the whole way on both sides, as well as a short time in the plaza part. The walkway is where there were all kinds of booths, selling different kinds of food and drinks, and I got to see the tourboats cruising the river, full of tourists looking at the blossoms on both sides.
The cherry trees weren’t the only things blooming, of course, there were flower beds all along the river, with all kinds of flowers all blooming at once. It was also kind of neat interacting with the birds, I’ve noticed that the birds are practically tame, they will let you come within a couple of feet of them, and they don’t usually fly away, they kind of walk away, looking at you, as if to say “what, no food? What good are you? I’m outta here!”
So, I ended up going over one of the bridges to Asakusa, to catch a train to Shinjuku Park, another well-known park with lots of cherry trees. But that’s for the next post!
