That’s Japanese for flower watching, I guess they mean appreciating the Cherry Blossoms. As I mentioned Cherry Blossoms aren’t native to Japan but they sure have it everywhere and when you see them altogether it is truly quite quite beautiful. They’re early this year with March 22 as the official blossom date for Tokyo. So I got to watch it all happen. Jules has a sakura tree the minute she steps out of her house and it had already bloomed in full force when I arrived.

When I saw this tree, I was like, “Oh wow!!” but the next few days showed me a thing or two about sakuras. I just wish my pictures spoke as much as the actual flowers did … oh well, nothing like the real thing, I guess.  While Jules was at her GABA seminar, Erv and I checked out Ueno Park, the place for hanami. It was a day before the official bloom date so there were lots of flowers still in their budding stage. Yet it was quite the sight already.

So when Jules had time, we headed right back down and we didn’t regret it one bit.  Every bud had blossomed and it was just different shades of pink all over the place.

We even did the whole bento thing. So there we were lunching out of our bentos and if it wasn’t for the annoying crows and Japan has some huge crows, they’re like the size of chickens, anyway if it wasn’t for the crows, I would have had a much better time 😛

We bought too much food and ate ourselves silly
so it was nice to walk around the park after that 🙂

That’s us before eating actually.

I like this pic I took of them 🙂
Speaks about our 21st century, I say 😉

And I like this Erv took of me and Jules

This is such a happy picture of them, I like 🙂

When we were walking and talking, we started discussing how come you don’t see a miniature version of the sakura, like a bonsai one where we can maybe keep at home to appreciate. Then when we left the park for Old Tokyo, we walked through are residential area and ta-dah, look what we found 🙂

So cute right, and so tempting to run with it
but the owners are smart … it’s chained down.

The other popular place to hanami is the Naka-Meguro area where these trees line a river. Earlier in the week, you could barely make out the pink but on my last night it was a sea of pink, even at night 🙂