Tokyo Imperial Palace: East Garden

Last Wednesday, I had another free afternoon and since it was neither Monday nor Friday, I took another trip to the Imperial Palace to visit the East Gardens. It was rainy, but open so I finally got to see it (unlike last time). In addition, the rain meant that instead of being crowded, it was pretty sparsely populated, which made it especially nice.

My local park is awesome

So I might not have brought this up before, but I live in a city called Wakō (和光) which is in Saitama prefecture, just outside of Tokyo. Typically, I'll tell people outside of Japan that I live in Tokyo which, while it isn't strictly true is true enough (it's like a 20 minute walk to Tokyo).

There are a lot of things I like around here, but there's one place that I've been getting a lot of use out of: the local park.

A walk of contrasts: wandering outside the Imperial Palace

Today, I had a free afternoon and was near Tokyo station so I thought I'd drop by the Imperial Palace. Since this was a little impromptu, I wasn't expecting to get super close (past a certain point, you need to have reserved a spot in a tour group), but I figured there are gardens and the like that should be nice.

Anyway, I managed to make my way there without too much trouble despite only having a general sense of where it was, and I got to observe the contrast between the moat, old walls, old bridge and traditional-looking buildings...

...and the very modern city just across the street. 

Personally, I thought this was an interesting contrast. I got to spend much time thinking about this contrast too since the first gate I approached was closed. Since it was a nice day, I didn't really mind and figured I'd walk to the next gate hoping it would be open.

Moar hanami!

Last week the sakura trees were in full bloom so of course, I took more pictures.

I wasn't sure that these were sakura until I saw a tree with a label on them (yes, some of the trees around here have little signs on them indicating species). I thought that the flowers were only white, but apparently, they can also be dark pink.

And a very pretty pink too.

Hanami has started!

Last week, I started getting excited about hanami and the budding of the sakura (cherry) trees. Well, they're still budding, but the ume (plum) trees have already started blooming. We went for a walk on the weekend and found some in the park near our house.

They're pretty from afar.