It's A Zoo Out There

Yesterday, the Hodemonster Family took Krust and I to a neighborhood called Ueno, a quaint little district containing quite a few temples, parks and other green areas, an ancient market street, and a zoo. Let's take it from the top.

After a 25-minute train ride to get there, we took a stroll down the Ameyayokocho, a bustling open-air market street that I'm told used to be a black market in the years following World War II. It had all the gritty, smoky charm you would expect from an Asian street market, until you looked at the price tags for everything and realized you were basically in a department store with a different flavor. Regardless, not a bad flavor.



Plus, bonus points to any area that has restaurants with life-like plastic recreations of their food in glass cabinets, designed to lure in customers:


We went to a tiny little traditional-style mom-and-pop restaurant and ate a tempura meal, deep-fried seafood with rice and the ubiquitous miso soup. Tempura is deep-fried in a very specific way, which results in characteristically lumpy and rather light-colored bits. It's delicious, especially with the curry salt and the tentsuyu sauce. It's also hilarious, especially when a chopstick-challenged Icelander spazzes out all over the place and drops an entire piece of squid into the saucebowl.

Or so I'm told.


After this we took a stroll down Ueno Park's lovely main garden path, where Krust and I were treated to the sight of our first ever cherry blossoms. It seems the sakura trees are blooming already in some parts of Tokyo (though not down here in Shinagawa-ku just yet). I'm told they're going to get thicker still, but here, at least, is a preliminary taste:
















Next up, we headed to the Ueno Zoo, which lies at the end of Ueno Park's main walkway. I decided right away that if I were going to take a picture of every animal in there I would run out of batteries or patience (whichever came first) very soon, so I went real easy on the camera. I did capture a few of our more remarkable animal friends, though (I'm not used to moving targets, so please forgive the blurring):



This is Ling Ling. He likes hang-gliding, knitting and judo, he's a great listener, and he has absolutely no qualms about taking a heroic dump in front of a number of camera-toting visitors. He's also dirty and scuffed, he walks with a loping gait that sort of makes you think he might have a hip condition, and seeing him there is just a tiny bit heartbreaking.


Those are the elephants. They smell bad. Really, REALLY bad. They're also either really capricious or their captivity has made them really perverted, because every once in a while one of them would stick his you-know-what up another elephant's you-know-what, then do you-know-what with it. Oh, but I've said too much already. Dear lord, how graphic.
















These three species were in the same pen together. The llamas, the tapirs and the capybaras. If that isn't a joke devised by the most fiendish surrealist in the world, then I shall consume my own posterior. We were physically unable to stop laughing. The whole thing was like a bawdy farce from a silent movie directed by a lunatic sex criminal.

All of these weird-ass animals are milling about, minding their own business. One of the bigger capybaras, who has been nonchalantly sidling up to the smallest one for the past 30 seconds or so, jumps on the latter's back and starts humping her (or him; what do I know). The small one gives a terrific squeak and bolts. The bigger one, not being so crass as to give chase, begins slowly sidling up to the small one again.

Ten seconds pass. Suddenly, for no good reason, one of the two tapirs breaks into A FEARSOME DEATH SPRINT right across the pen. If you've ever seen a tapir sprinting frenziedly, you know what I'm talking about. It looks like God had some bugs in the code and couldn't find people to fix them before the seventh day deadline.

So then the second tapir sees the first one doing the mad death sprint, and at that, it too goes into a death sprint of its own. So now there are two of nature's most baffling creations sprinting breathlessly back and forth FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY AND HONOR AND GLORY, and the capybaras are looking at them wondering what the hell's going on. The llamas, meanwhile, have this sort of airy detachment going on, like they've seen it all before and are trying to figure out a way to charge people extra for watching.

Just as the tapirs abruptly slow down and go to have a drink at the small oasis, we hear a squeak from the other end of the pen. The bigger capybara has finally sidled close enough up to the smallest one to mount her (him) again. Once more the squeak, once more the bolt. The big guy begins another slow sidle.

FIN

We also saw some polar bears.


Ferociously underwhelming. All they did, the poor things, was walk back and forth on the tiny crag of space alloted to them in their fake-ice environment, like it was their runway and they were stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Day-style fashion show.

"Maybe they're looking for their Coca-Cola," remarked Hodezor.


Japanese snow monkeys. Uhh...

We also saw some flamingoes! And penguins! Ha ha ha!
















If flamingoes weren't so hot pink, I swear, they'd be extinct from uninterestingness by now. Seriously - we stood there for fifteen minutes, and all they did was blink. At least the penguins waddled single-file back to their cave, giving us leeway to antropomorphize them in all sorts of incredibly endearing ways.

By the way, I am really glad humans don't control evolution.


Obligatory funny building shots of the day: