How I Spent My Spring Vacation: Ueno, Soba, Tempura, Nippori

[ladynox25]

Wednesday morning hoya99 and I headed back to Ueno to see if the cherry blossoms had come out. They were just starting to bloom, although one or two trees were quite spectacular. We wandered around the park, looking at the museums, but they all seemed to be showcasing Western art, which I wasn't too interested to see. As I told hoya99, if I wanted to see paintings by Goya, I could go to the National Art Gallery in D.C. Coming out of the park at the main entrance, we started looking for a place to eat lunch and came across another udon/soba place.

Although my previous experience with hot udon proved that my chopstick skills are lacking when it comes to handling noodles, I still wanted to try cold soba, so hoya99 and I went up. This time, *he* had the udon and I had cold soba with tempura on the side. I loved it. And, for whatever reason, soba noodles seemed easier to deal with than the thick udon had been. I'm sure it helped that I wasn't burning my mouth, either. *smile* From there, we headed back to the train station and up to Nippori.

Nippori has some nice temples, but what hoya99 had brought me to see was a Japanese graveyard. You see, my mom and I used to go gravestone rubbing up in NoVa. You take some tracing paper and charcoal or pastels, place it over the tombstone, and rub, and the impression comes out on the paper. So I guess you could say that I'm interested in graveyards, mainly for the artwork that's on the tombstones. hoya99 took me into a fairly extensive graveyard and we wandered around it for quite a while. We didn't go into the plots, as that was forbidden, but we did get some nice pictures.

Traditionally, Japanese people visit their family gravesites over the Vernal Equinox, so almost all the graves were neat, swept clear of leaves, with incense and flowers in abundance. We saw a couple of people cleaning graves while we were there. The sky was cloudy and the ravens were everywhere--a nice touch. We visited some nearby temples before heading back to Shinjuku, where hoya99 introduced me to his favorite bookstore. This managed to keep us occupied for a couple of hours, and then we headed home and had some delicious pasta, again, courtesy of hoya99's dad.



To be continued...