A shrine and a baseball game
We have had quite an eventful day today. I dragged Patrick and Michael off to Kameido this afternoon as I wanted to see Kameido Tenjin Shrine and its famed Japanese Wisteria. Unfortunately the signage around the area is about as good as the signage anywhere else is Tokyo, so we spent quite a time wandering about looking for it.
I thought the walk was interesting at any rate, and we came across another lovely shrine along the way that we wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t got us a little lost.
We eventually found Kameido Tenjin, but it seems that we were a little late for the Wisteria. It probably all fell off as we were walking about the place trying to find it. I was horribly diasppointed, as I had been looking forward to seeing it all week.
At least we did discover that the ponds at the shrine were full of huge Koi and lovely tortoises that all swam about looking up at us or sunbathed on the little stone islands in the ponds.
We went to watch a baseball game after the shrine-viewing, which was a first for all of us.
Its turns out that the game itself is very long and uneventful, but the crowds are fun as usual. At the first home run, every single member of the crowd produced a little green umbrella from out of nowhere and danced about with it. It was completely unexpected, and very amusing.
At one point in the game, a special golden umbrella was awarded to the man who had danced the most enthusiastically.
We were also impressed to see that the fans used dozens of real trumpets to play out the team tunes instead of the awful colourful plasic ones we are used to back home.
Finally, and most exciting of all, Patrick caught one of the balls that was thrown into the crowd. Now we are the proud owners of a real Tokyo Baseball!
We ended up escaping before the game finished as it was so long and really quite boring to watch.
We went to Pronto for dinner and had the nicest pizza I have had for a long time, as well as some fantastic tomato and mozarella salad. The food there is really nice, but it becomes horribly smoky in the evenings, and I can smell the smoke on my clothes even as I type.
Michael has collected his key to his apartment, so, seeing as we were in the area, we went and had a peek after dinner. It has a much better view than ours, and a bigger living area. We are a little bit jealous.
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