Rain, Rain, Go Away!

After the fish market we were scheduled to visit Ueno park. This is a famous park in Tokyo where they do "Hanami" or flower watching.

April is the month when the Sakura, or Cherry Blossoms, bloom. This happens once per year. After it blooms the flower petals will float to the ground throughout the day covering the ground in pink, or white flower petals. Once all the petals fall (they all fall in less than 1 week!) the tree is left bare for the rest of the year.

It's the national tree of Japan, so april is a special month. People come out to sit under the trees, have lunch, drink sake, and enjoy themselves.

Unfortunately for us the first day of bloom it was raining quite hard, so the petals that would normally be blanketing the ground were wet and smooshed. No one was out sitting under the trees either!

Since the sky was cloudy the pictures didn't turn out too nice. Plus it was hard taking pictures with one hand while holding an umbrella in the other! So this time around i didn't grab too many pics. Here is a shot of one of the trees.

We actually lucked out for the 3 weeks we were there. We started in the warmer region and progressed through colder regions each week. The trees bloom later when it is colder -- so we ended up seeing the trees in full bloom for all 3 weeks of the trip!

I actually have better pictures of the sakura coming up in the later posts. But, I'm posting in chronological order.

This was the last week for some of the people in our group. So they needed more bags to carry souvenirs home. We found this bag shop in the park where you can get them for about $10.00 each!

Now, i saw this sign on a bag. It's written in Japanese and I was instantly drawn to it! I can't quite figure out why, but I wanted to buy this bag :D.

I pointed it out to my Japanese speaking friend and he said, "What? I don't see anything weird!"

Is it just me???