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Patrick saw a snake in Yoyogi Park this morning. A very large, black snake.

I am not sure if snakes are common around here, but I never expected to see one in central Tokyo.

We decided to have our lunch in Meiji Park instead, just in case…

I am loving our picnic lunches. The convenience stores here have the most amazing selection of fresh, packaged meals to choose from. It will be months before we run out of picnic menu options. This is one thing I will definitely miss when we leave, the simple, healthy and cheap meals from the convenience stores.

Today I had a silken tofu lunch box, which came with a little packet of silken tofu and numerous seasonings to mix in. It had tiny, tiny tempura fish, dried seaweed, pickled something-or-other and various other yummy things. If only we had this sort of snack option at every 7eleven in Melbourne, I think I would have eaten a much healthier quantity of Kettle chips and chocolate in the past.

Just as we finished our rather substantial lunch, an announcement rang out over the loudspeakers to remind us not to bring food or drink into the park, so as to keep it beautiful and free of rubbish. Oops.

A little embarrassing, but no so bad, as we weren’t aware beforehand, and are always careful to clean up after ourselves and make sure no litter is left behind.

Well… usually we are….

Not even a minute after the announcement, an ugly great crow appeared out of nowhere and flew off with our rubbish bag. Patrick leapt up and chased him off down the hill, much to the delight of all the other people sitting about in the park.

Unfortunately the crow casually flapped off across the lake and disappeared into the trees.

Now we understand the no-food-in-the-park rule.

After we had made a swift and quiet exit from Meiji Park, we headed off to Saitama to watch the Urawa Red Diamonds play Sydney FC. Patrick bought us Urawa fan tickets this time, so we were right in the middle of all the action.

I was enormously impressed by the singing ability of the Urawa fans; I don’t remember any Victory fans every singing so tunefully. A You Tube search of “Urawa Reds Supporters” brings up a few videos of these fans at work, they are pretty remarkable. I think Sydney FC did an excellent job of playing to that crowd.

La la la la Urawa red-suu…

We clapped along to the theme song of “The Great Escape” and to “We are Sailing”, and lots of other things I couldn’t quite recognise at the time.

I’ll have to learn the words for next time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 1:22 am and is filed under Tokyo, food, sports, parks, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.