Sumo land and two long walks

This morning we went to a sumo place near Ryogoku. We saw a sumo in the train station as we were coming out. We went to the sumo stadium place, but it was all closed up and they didn't have any sumo matches until the 2nd half of November.

We walked around the streets south of the station, which was meant to be where some of the sumos lived, hoping to see more sumos. We did see a sumo riding a bike, unfortunately I was getting me camera ready for a pano, so I missed taking a photo of him.

After walking round quite a bit and not seeing any more sumos, we walked round Kyu-Yasuda park, then up Sumidagawa. Alongside the river there were quite a few tramps houses, which consisted of tents or blue tarpaulins over some sort of frame. The tramps seemed to be resaonably well off as far as tramps go, having pots and pans, and one had an expensive looking mountain bike (others had bikes as well). It seemed they got money from collecting cans and metal for recycling.

We walked up the river towards the Asahi Breweries Headquarters, which looks a bit like a pint of frothy beer. Then we went to Sumida Park, which was a government recommended tourist site, and also had quite a few other government recommended tourist sites nearby.

We went through Sumida Park a bit, then crossed the river and went to Sensoji Temple, which was all covered up as it was having building work done on it. We then walked to Ueno Park and saw Toshogu Shrine, which was also all covered up having building work done on it. There were also some tramps houses in Ueno Park. In the park we watched a magician bloke do a performance.

We carried on through Ueno park to the lake bit, then went from there to the nearest station, which was Yushima station. From there we got the Metro to Otemachi, then the Toei subway from Otemachi to Onarimon.

We had about an hour's rest at the hotel while I wrote this blog post, then we walked up towards Rainbow bridge. We got to Rainbow Bridge at 7pm, so it was still open, and we went up in the lift and walked across it. You got a good view from the bridge, but it was very windy.

It took us over an hour to get across because I took one 360 pano and two partial panos, which took a long time to do given the long exposure times involved (the bridge is over 1km long as well). When we got to the other side we went down onto a beach area, then through a town bit, then across the Tokyo Teleport bridge (which didn't seem to actually have anything to do with teleportation) to Pallet Town.

There wasn't much in Pallet town, I didn't even see any pallets. We did go in an acrcade there though, which was quite empty. It had skill coin operated animals that you could sit on and ride around. Moccle went on some track'n' field style game, which cost 100 yen, and also went on a Pachinko machine for 100 yen.

On the Pachinko machine, it just keeps shooting out balls, there seemed to be a hole in the middle of the machine that you want the balls to go down (as well as a hole at the bottom of the machine where you don't want them to go), and when you get a ball in this hole it stops one fruit machine style thing. So if you get 3 balls in the middle hole you stop all 3 fruit machine things, and presumably if the fruit machine things are lined up properly you would get some points or extra balls or something. As it happened, the fruit machine things never made a line of three of a kind, so we didn't find out.

We started walking up the road to go to Tokyo Big Sight, but then realised it was actually quite far away, so we went back to Pallet Town and got the train from near there (Aomi station) to Shimbasi, which was quite expensive, 370 yen. But when we got past Takeshiba station, we worked out that actually Takeshiba was the station we wanted. Unfortunately we hadn't written this down, so Moccle had thought that we wanted Shimbashi station.

Shimbashi station was actually about the same distance away from the hotel as Takeshiba, but we didn't know how to get back to the hotel from Shimbashi, whereas we did know how to get back to the hotel from Takeshiba. I did have the gps with me, so we tried using that, but since we didn't have any way to reconcile our location in real life with our location according to the gps, it wasn't much help. I did try doing a 'go to' the hotel on the gps, but whether we were walking up the street or down the street, the gps showed us getting further away from the hotel.

So we walked back up the street towards the train tracks, and then we at least had some way to reconcile our location in real life with our location on the gps. After we had done that, we could work out which way to take to get back to the hotel using the gps. After a bit we came across a map, so we used that along with the gps to get back onto the shopping street that we would have walked up to get to the hotel if we had got off the train at Takeshiba station.

When we had got back to the shopping street, we walked up and down it a bit trying to find somewhere to eat, there was the two places where you have to eat at a bar that we saw the other day, so we couldn't go there since I would need somewhere to put my tripod down, and then we also found another similar restaurant that also had tables. First we didn't go in there as it didn't look like they had an English menu, and I didn't want to be ordering random stuff as it would probably fishy and I wouldn't like it. Then we noticed that the time on the door said something like 4-22, as it was already 22.30, we couldn't really go in there if they were meant to close at 10pm.

So we just went back down the street a bit and ordered 4 cheeseburgers from McDonalds. Then we walked down the street towards the hotel and went in the am pm shop near the bottom of the road. We bought some more food/drink from there, then went back to the hotel.

When we got back to the hotel we ate our dinner and watched a bit of TV, mainly a program about Japanese houses, which I think was actually a learning English program. I copied the rest of the pics I'd taken to the laptop, sorted all today's pics, copied them to the hard drives, and wrote the rest of today's blog post, then went to bed about 1.30am.

Food
Breakfast: ½ Zushiri Apple turnover pastry; ½ Double Cream Japanese Pumpkin bread; Chocochip bread finger thing; a couple of very small chocolate chip cookies; coffee.
Morning snack: Small chocolate choc chip cookies; water.
Tea: 2x small croissants; coffee.
Dinner: 2x McDonalds cheeseburgers; Ice cream; Pocky Sticks; glass of Coca Cola.