After a lot of weekends in Tokyo, its difficult to know where else to visit. Until I stumbled upon this Tokyo tourism webpage with a list of recommended walks around Tokyo. Going through the whole list, I went for the “Discover old Edo (Half Day) [Monzen-Nakacho]” route. This involves taking the Toei line all from Yoyogi JR all the way to Kiyosumi-Shirakawa station.
Kiyosumi Garden
A short walk away is the Kiyosumi Garden, which cost 150Y to enter, which is not too bad considering the gardens are quite well maintained, and the lake there filled with turtles and the largest Kois I have ever seen, some of them size of a full sized cat. This would make a nice place to do some landscape photography with tripods. The rest of the route is a nice walk, but nothing special.
A little bored after, I decided to go to Minami-Osawa to check out the Asics and Mont-Bell outlets. The trip starts at Shinjuku station, where you jump on board the Keio line trains bound for Chofu. This is not the New Keio line (no idea where it goes). Chofu is the station where all the trains on the Keio Line seems to run. If you’re lucky there are local, rapid and express trains that branches off from Chofu station to Hashimoto, which is the direction that you want to go. But the quickest way is to take one of those Special Express or Semi Special Express trains that skips most of the stations along the way straight to Chofu, and you can switch to the Hashimoto train on the same platform.
La Fete Tama Outlets, Minami-Osawa
The station to stop would be Minami-Osawa. Once exiting from the station, the outlet centre is on the right of the station exit. I don’t know the facination with the French, but the whole centre is modelled on a French village. Anyway, went looking for shoes, and Japanese sizes seems to be in cm, and the issue is most shops seems to stop at 30cm (size 12 US) while my current running shoes are all at least 30.5cm. Too bad. But however, bought a Mont-Bell Gore-tex XCR jacket. The thing I like about Mont-Bell products is that most of them comes with a little pouch, and they’re mostly packable. The model I bought is Dyna Action Parka without excessive layers, etc so it packs into a little package that just a little larger than an short umbrella. Very very nice.
On the way back to Meguro station, saw some nice sunsets made with the overcast skies. Easy day today, still recovering from yesterday’s hike in Kirifuri.
nangka.org 