Day Two, Part Two: Ueno

Ueno Koen (Ueno Park) is Tokyo's first public park when it opened in 1873. When we arrived, at about midday from Akihabara, we had enough time to check out the tables at a market in the park, then get to the Tokyo National Museum, meeting up with the Bandiera family. The museum exhibits included paintings, ceramics, swords, kimonos, and sculptures.






After our museum visit, Wayne and I took off on foot heading eastward in search of Sensoji temple. We stopped many times to orient ourselves with maps without street names and street names that were only printed in Japanese. Needless to say, we felt fairly lost. We must have appeared as lost as we felt because a friendly woman used the little English that she spoke to assure us that we were heading in the correct direction for the temple, but were still 20 minutes away. We were hungry and thirsty, so we selected a restaurant based on the plastic food display out front.


We were provide a menu of photos with basic English labels, but it was not easy to find items to eat. Our server assured us that the temple yakitori was delicious. No thank you. Instead, we ordered smoked chicken and pork haslets. The meal got stranger as we bit into the curried haslet and speculated what haslet actually was. Making the meal more awkward was our server standing next to our table, grinning at us the entire time. After sharing that meal with her, I had to have my photo taken with her. She complained afterward that her eye was funny in photos. Looking at the photo, I have the funny eye, but probably because my mind was still racing with ideas of what haslet could actually be.


I found out that evening that haslet refers to a herbed pork meatloaf - not what I had eaten - or a collection of innards, typically including intestine, heart, and kidney. Yummers!