I woke up today with such high ambitions. I had planned to go see a special exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and then figure out what to do from there (maybe walking to Yanaka and then Nishi-Nippori or something).
I headed out a bit later than I wanted to and headed to Ueno Park. I ended up walking along Shinobazu Pond like I did the other day but this time I got a better view of the Bentendo and lotuses
I also got a closer look at the lotuses and the top of the water. I wondered how gross it would feel if you accidentally fell in. SUPER gross I'm sure. Ugh!
Also apparently, the lotuses bloom in mid-July to mid-August and this particular lotus pond is renowned for its beauty. Well based on how it is in September, I'm not sure I'd be coming to Tokyo in July to witness them myself!
Around this time, I was thinking to myself that it seemed particularly busy out but that it might be because people were heading back to work from lunch or something. However, after I topped the stairs near the Kiyomizu Kannon-dō Temple, I started to see a lot more strollers and families walking around as well. It was at this point I looked it up and came to find out that, yes, today was a national public holiday in Japan.
I guess it's cool that they have the Autumnal Equinox Day to celebrate the equinox? I had a bad feeling about the museum though. Partly because the main exhibits at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum are free, but also because the paid exhibit is for Van Gogh (who as I seem to recall is somewhat popular?).
I decided to finish up my walk just in case I was worried for nothing but I kept thinking like oh if the population of the Tokyo metro area is 41 million, if .1% of them deided to go there would be 40k visitors today. Anyway that's ridiculous thinking because a popular exhibit of Klimt in 2019 was getting 7,900 per day and the article called that staggering!
Regardless, the museum was too busy for me lol There was a huge line on both the left and ride sides when entering and rather than figuring out what the lines were even for I just noped right on out of there.
It was also interesting to me that the main plaza area of Ueno Park didn't have anything going on. Usually, every time I visit I notice and go to some event here. During one of my visits last year I had even soliloquized
I actually am beginning to wonder if there's ever not an event there?
It turns out the answer is yes!
I basically gave up on doing any touristy things today and decided to just wander around and window shop a bit.
I went to Bic Camera to get a cheap router (tl;dr room wifi spotty when connecting local devices and local network might be shared between apartments? Unsure) and ran into this lego display. Guess whoever set it up hates R2-D2 lol Like it seems pretty unusual to me to see C3P0 without R2? But I'm not a huge Star Wars fan so maybe it's more normal than I'd guess lol
I also stopped in Muji to get a lint roller. One thing I hadn't really considered (IDK why I didn't notice last year either) is that if you wash you laundry and then hang it up to dry, the lint doesn't like automatically come off like if you did it in a regular dryer in the US. So anyway, my laundry ended up especially linty, which wouldn't really matter to me that much if so much of it wasn't like black things and the lint wasn't pure white. I guess that's also my fault though since I was the one that washed the clothes and towels at the same time.
Anyway, while we are talking about laundry, my unit has a clothes washer but no dryer (at least not the kind I would personally expect in like the US). Luckily, the compartment bathroom can function as a clothes dryer. So basically, you can hang up your clothes in the bathroom like in the photo above. Then, you can use the panel right outside of the bathroom to use the dryer function. It's basically built into the ventilation system of the bathroom section.
You can set the dry duration and afterwards it will automatically turn off. The ventilation system itself is pretty cool, I guess it ensures that the bathroom fully dries out and doesn't get moldy, even if you don't dry clothes in there. Also take this info with a grain of salt in case I am misusing it somehow LOL If you are more interested, here is a Bloomberg article talking more about the phenomenon. Apparently, it's called "yokushitsu kansouki" (bathroom dryer) and interestingly, the article mentions that it is more energy efficient than tumble dryers. I don't see a source for that claim though but did see various HackerNews threads arguing about it. I think mainly the claim stems from these using heat pumps (IDK if true) whereas some dryers use resistive heating which is less efficient.
Anyway, not an expert on that. Let's wrap up this blog post with (one of) today's snack(s)!
