In which London is beguiling

On Friday night Andy and I had planned to play table tennis in the park, but the free racquets were gone (read:stolen) It's one of those things where you can do free sports outdoors, which I love, but it's a wee bit unreliable.  With our plans cancelled suddenly we didn't really want to go home on a perfect sunny night so we decided to go back to our wandering ways and see what we could find.

We ended up walking along the canal side, and I was like a child high on sugar, if there were children who were all 'ooooooh' about architecture. The flats by the canal side all the way were so gorgeous and interesting. Lots of different kinds of re-purposed factories, with balconies and people bbqing in the sun. We passed a canal boat bookshop, interesting graffiti and people doing a pottery class outdoors.

 

 

If you follow my blog with some serious dedication you may have seen a blog I wrote some time ago about Hamstead Heath, and then more recently I wrote about visiting Fryent Park - another spot of nature in amongst the metropolis of London. Then, all this. And I've finally realised that I love London.

There. I said it.

It felt scary to admit it after spending so long being all 'I'm a country girl' and 'Ugh, cities' and 'I only live in London because it's where the jobs are'. Please don't hate me for the hypocrisy! London has won me over with its sneaking bewitching ways. I think it was partly going to Japan that did it. You see, when I was in Japan everything was interesting - as you've seen from the blog posts - it was all new. The vending machines, the crossings, the trains, the way the food is served. Ordinary banalities of life were cool, because they were new. And then I thought about how we had barely scratched the surface of all the things to see in Japan in under 3 weeks - so how would you do Britain, and how interesting would Britain be? It's got dales and mountains, Edinburgh and Durham and Cornwall and the Lake District and London. I considered all the interesting things I see just between the train station and my Japanese class. A 15 minute walk that goes past the London Eye, HMS President all painted up cubist style, London Bridge, this weird half finished building with only a front and no floors, this huge grand structure with pillars all the way round, and along the Thames. London just seems so much more fascinating when I really look at it. So I'm going to just keep on exploring.

I love all the glam city workers drinking on the roof next to this unfinished thing. It' just a beautiful contrast.

Starting off the canal side walk it looked more like a sci-fi setting at first.

 

Found a Venezuelan restaurant by the canal.

 

I haven't been carrying my DSLR every day (shock!) but in the last week I've been discovering the joy of taking random snaps of stuff with my phone. I hear this is a thing other people do too? :D  So these are all camera phone pictures, hence the dubious quality.

In which I visited Tokyo

 

This is my last post about Japan! I know - I've been back well over a month, but it's been so busy I have hardly had time for blogging. I really hope life calms down a little bit soon.
I'm going to write about the 3rd part of our trip, visiting the big cities of Tokyo and Osaka. It was quite a change from the relaxed beauty of Kyoto and the smaller feel of Yudanaka.

• Mascots. Everything imaginable has a mascot - sometimes 2, like Tokyo Tower. There's a little bear with an apple of his hear for JR East Railway or a Ninja Girl and her frog for the city of Matsumoto. In Tokyo we went to 'Character Street' which was part of the underground mall in Tokyo Station. It's a whole collection of shops dedicated to mascots or characters including: Hello Kitty, One Piece, Snoopy, Miffy, Domo, Doraemon and Pokemon.
  
• So many selfie sticks
  
• There's lots of smoking in the bar/restaurant places and I kind of liked it, but it was also weird because it's been a long time since you could do that in the UK. I thought it was nice when mixed with the smoke of the fried meat and all the cooking smells in the bars.

• We were taken out to a restaurant that had gardens of it's own, with a tofu kitchen amongst the trees. It was rebuilt in Tokyo using wood from ancient buildings across Japan, and served a 9 course meal including the best sushi of our lives.

• I miss gyoza. I wasn't expecting to fall in love with Japanese dumplings but mmmm I need to find them again. 

• Harajuka was not full of girls in gothic lolita outfits. Not a bit. There were some shopkeepers in fancy clothes but the images of Fruits magazine were just not there.

• Temples have an interesting  mix of of religion and tourism. People come from all over Japan to carry out the rituals at the shrines: washing, ringing the bell, clapping and throwing money through a slotted box in front of the shrine. But they'd do all that and then get out the selfie stick and pose for 10 photos.

• There's English all over the place. In the names of chain shops like Lawson or 7/11, and in the bizarre slogans, like this Pachinko parlour: It is strong in time, and it gently to time tough at time. A message for our times. There was also useful English on the tube listing out the stops, and even on buses in Kyoto. That doesn't mean that it was easy to understand that world, but you can go a long way without speaking Japanese. I just found it challenging trying to actively understand the Japanese all around me.

• They served tako yaki in the aquarium (in Osaka now). Round the corner from the octopus in the tank, you could eat bits of its brethren in deep fried balls...

• Finally, it's been so long since we've been back, but I still look at the photos of the shrines in the mountains, and the cherry trees and feel completely at peace.