Last week our Japanese friend and host took us to a nice part of town called Kichijoji. Our friend Junko Sasaki has been so kind to let us stay with her for a week in her apartment in Tokyo.  We met her in Los Angeles a couple of years ago as she was building her career as a dancer and artist.  She has been very accommodating and suggested that we wake up early to go to Kichijoji and have lunch boxes.

Kichijoji is at the end of the Keio train line in Tokyo.  A very nice area for shopping, food and scenery.  In Kichijoji there is a large park that has cherry blossom trees that surround it.  You can also rent a large duck boat and pedal down the lake if you like.  It is called Inokashira Park.  So, we arrived at the Kichijoji train station to the bustling of people already in the groove of their workday.  On a side note, many of the more popular train stations in Tokyo have malls attached to it.  These malls are amazing!! They have so much choices and items you will want to buy.  Just their food level alone will have so much food you will want to buy.  At Kichijoji there is an organic market, regular groceries, meat counters, preserved and pickled food, cheese, crepes, japanese sweets,  mochi counter, bakeries (like 4 or 5!!), ramen, sushi, okonomiyaki, tempura, tofu, yakitori, doughnuts, cafés, tea shop, western food and…phew!!! There is so much food, and all looks so good and is fresh.  The Japanese are big about expiration dates and food presentation.  And this is only the food floor.  There are other floors for clothes and housewares, all of which you will want to have 🙂

So back to our outing.  Junko settled on a lunchbox, whereas Angelo and I went to this bakery shop and got a whole bag of pastries!  Then we walked over to the park and found a nice bench by the water to eat.  There were a little bit of cherry blossoms left on the trees, but mostly they are green now.  I got this mixed berry pastry, so delicious!  Angelo bought like 4 pastries, he ate them all.  His favorite one is this bread that has bacon interwoven into it.  Happy Angelo!

After eating, we walked around the park looking at the nice scenery and enjoying the day out.  We see a lot of Shiba Inu here in Japan, or Junko says they are called Shiba Ken.  They are very smart dogs, don’t mess with them.  We also saw this dog, oh my heart melted!

Inokashira Park also has a nice temple and the groundskeeper said it was ok to take pictures of the shrines.  We loved how colorful it was.  Right now I have been noticing that many of these statues have been dressed in bonnets and with aprons on.  We like the temples as it offers a lot of quiet for meditation and peaceful thinking.  Also it smells good with Japanese incense burning, it makes you calm.  There was this memorial with a piano, so I had to stand and pretend playing it.  Lots of trees surround the walkways in the park, they are very green right now.  Junko says in fall it is very beautiful as the leaves are bright red and orange.  We also saw lots of koi fish at the other side of the lake.  You are not allowed to feed them, which we weren’t going to do anyways.  They are huge! When they see you standing over the water they stick their faces up above the water and open their mouths.  It’s actually kind of freaky!  It looks like their jaws are separating from their faces.

After walking around for quite awhile, we walked Junko back to the train station as she had to work.  Angelo and I went to this discount store called Don Quijote so Angelo could get new luggage.  We have been working on these posts late at night, so sorry for all the grammatical errors! Thanks for reading everyone, hope you are enjoying the blog!

Love,

Onisha and Angelo