18 August, 2010

Another day another park

Parks just find us, I'm sure of it. Today we were desperate. One of my early thoughts upon waking was,  How are we going to keep the boys busy today?

The weather has been mid to high 30s (Celcius) since Sunday. Someone even reported 42.5 degrees yesterday, though I'm not sure where they got that figure from. It has been too hot to go outside for very long, that is for sure. "Cabin fever" is usually associated with cold winter weather, but we've got it avoiding the heat.

But I wasn't looking for a park to go to. I was looking for somewhere fairly large, inside that wasn't a shop and that we could get to on a train (still don't have the car sorted) and that didn't cost a fortune.

Asking a lot? Well we found it. We took two trains to Shinjuku, one of the large CBDs in the Tokyo area. It also has some tall buildings. At least one of which you can ascend for free to a viewing platform on the 45th floor. All we paid for all day was our train fares, lunch and drinks.

After rambling around on that floor for a while our 5 y.o. got bored. Who would guess? The rest of us were fairly okay. Thankfully we'd seen this view from the 45th floor and figured there was a park somewhere close by and went in search of it.

Here is what we found.


So that's 5 parks in 13 days.

Tomorrow my husband goes back to work so that will curtail our mobility a bit. The boys are getting better at trains (and so am I), but I'm still not keen on taking them far on my own.

Oh, by the way, here was the view from the top of the tower. Yes, it was a bit hazy today.

This is what the inside of the 45th floor looked like.





After the boys exhausted themselves at the park (in only half an hour) we staggered back to airconditioning and the train and found these on our way. In the midst of a stern working environment (about 6 000 people can work in this one tower alone), these ladybirds seem out of place. But we enjoyed them.

2 comments:

KarenKTeachCamb said...

That looks like a fun park! And those ladybirds are impressive too!

Peter Y said...

Yep, the Tokyo city government building is a useful one to remember - a free view from a good height. Go again in winter - great view of Mt. Fuji! I took a friend there soon after 9/11 and felt a bit odd being in a twin-tower building... Somewhere on the ground floor there was a corner with lots of graphic displays about life in Tokyo.