My husband and I have just spent one delightful week in Tsukuba, Japan, but our stay is coming to an end. We leave tomorrow for Tokyo. Tsukuba is a center for Japan’s research and scientific community, not a major cosmopolitan city like Tokyo. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful place. Japanese culture is full of pride and tradition. The city is so clean! There are no leaves on the ground and everything is neatly pruned. It is so nice to walk around the area surrounding our hotel and enjoy the scenery. There are no skyscrapers or noisy cars. Everyone, from school children to adults, rides bicycles. There are numerous bike parking lots and biking paths away from the driving traffic. You can walk around the city and not fear for your safety, and everyone’s so polite and always smiling. In the department stores, the sales clerks all bow and greet you with a hello; at closing time, they leave their station to stand in the hallway, bow and say goodnight!
One of our first discoveries were the carp ponds, and they are a site to behold! Those fish are HUGE! There are signs everywhere telling you not to feed the fish, but no one really pays attention to this. There’s even a store that sells fish food right next to one of the ponds. So, being typical tourists, we bought a couple of bags and fed the fish.
Here’s a close up shot. You can really see how big they are.
There’s an alpha male in every species. This carp made it known he was the boss of this part of the pond!
Because this is a research area, there are hardly any historic buildings to be seen, but we managed to find a quaint old tea house. Notice the beautiful thatched roof.
Our visit culminated with a trip to the Tsukuba Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, we missed the the Cherry Blossoms, but there were some plants with lovely flowers, like the rhododendrons and cacti.
Tomorrow, on our way to Tokyo, we will visit the old city of Nikko, which has an incredible Shogun palace. I cannot wait to share my experiences in both Nikko and Tokyo with you next week.
Simone
