Day 11: Ashikaga Flower Park and Ikebukuro

Ashikaga Flower Park #

So we’d finally arrived. It was the last day of our trip. Our flight out of Haneda Airport wasn’t until 11 p.m., though, so we still had a full day of sightseeing in front of us.

I’d loved all the things we’d seen and done on this trip but this was definitely one of those vacations for which you need a subsequent vacation. I knew I’d gone hard but I come to Japan so infrequently that I could travel no other way!

Vannie and I checked out of the hotel in time to catch the 9:12 a.m. train out of Maihama Station to Tokyo. We stowed our luggage, once again in the Yaechika locker alcove, and hopped on a shinkansen to Ashikaga Flower Park.

I’d seen photos of the wisteria in bloom at this park years ago and had clocked it as something I’d love to see with my own eyes if the timing worked out — which was tricky, because I’d originally thought we’d make it for sakura season but miss fuji season, which happened slightly later. The opposite proved true: Though we’d largely missed the cherry blossoms, the wisteria were in full bloom.

The closer we got to Ashikaga Flower Park Station — I should have intuited the demand if the park had its own train station — the more terrible a feeling I got as more and more people got on the train obviously bound for the same place as us.

By the time we arrived at our stop, there was a crush of people both inside the train waiting to get off and outside the train waiting to get on.

Vannie and squeezed out. There were so many people that the station staff weren’t even requiring people to use the ticket gates; they were just manually collecting paper fares. Because we had our JR Passes, which (say it with me now!) weren’t meant to be turned in, we just flashed them to the staff to get by.

The garden was stunning, the tree branches dripping with purple and white wisteria, and all sorts of other flowers in full bloom. But the press of people, coupled with the warm, sunny day, was not pleasant, leading me to do a quick circuit of the park before we immediately left, not wanting to linger in such crowded circumstances and the heat.

While I’m glad and grateful to have gotten to see the wisteria, which was spellbinding, given how massively popular this park is, coupled with its smaller size (it was certainly considerably smaller than Hitachi Seaside Park), I’m not sure I would recommend it.

Ikebukuro #

Our sightseeing done for the day, we improvised our remaining hours in Tokyo. Vannie wanted to try a dessert buffet in Ikebukuro, so we headed in that direction by train.

Although I’d always gotten reserved seats for our morning shinkansen rides, because we didn’t want to be bound to a specific time for returning, we usually just played the odds with unreserved seats when we rode the shinkansen back. Unfortunately, today this meant boarding a shinkansen bound for our layover station, Omiya, with no unreserved seats open.

So we squeezed in the vestibule between cars alongside several other passengers in the same position as us. Fortunately that leg of our trip was only about 20 minutes, though if felt like an eternity as I tried to not make eye contact with my neighbor passengers as we stood cheek-by-jowl.

It was on the last leg of our journey to Ikebukuro that Van realized she’d lost her locker receipt at some point during the day. The receipt had the QR code she needed to scan in order to reopen her locker. There was nothing to be done for the moment, so we just continued on to Ikebukuro.

I looked up what else was in the Ikebukuro area and saw Itoya, the 12-story stationery shop we’d visited in Ginza on our first day, had another branch in Ikebukuro (though one that was much smaller than the Ginza shop). At this point we were trying to use up our remaining Japanese cash. It felt a little profligate to find reasons to spend our money but I persevered, buying some postcards and a shitajiki writing board at the Ikebukuro Itoya.

From there, we went in search of the dessert buffet, Sweets Paradise, or “Suipara.” The entrance proved surprisingly elusive. We ended up entering through the exit, and I’m still not sure, given that the stairs and the elevator opened to the same landing, where the entrance was situated.

The staff looked slightly exasperated by our bumbling but Japan isn’t known for its customer service for nothing; the staff directed us to the ticket machine for us to choose to the type of meal we wanted. We chose the option that offered the dessert buffet and the hot food minus ice cream, which cost more, and were told we had 70 minutes to eat.

During that time, I wrote postcards to my friends — I stopped at the post office right afterward to mail them — and ate steadily but sparingly so as not to irritate my stomach before our long outbound flight. Van had read it was a popular spot among students as a cheap meal where you could load up on food. It offered a variety of sweets but also food for a proper meal like rice, vegetables, soup and pasta. We definitely saw students there in their school uniforms, as well as mother-daughter pairings.

Back to the airport #

The information desk at Yaechika shopping center was still open by the time we got back to Tokyo Station in the early evening. They directed us to an English-speaking employee, who called mall security and explained our situation with Vannie’s locker.

We thought there’d be a charge for this service — our Google Translate of the signs on the lockers had suggested as much — but there wasn’t! The staff did ask to review Van’s passport as well as have her describe her luggage before they handed it over but they made the process so efficient and straightforward, for which we were relieved and appreciative.

Van’s luggage retrieved, we took the reverse journey back to the airport, riding the train back to Hamamatsucho Station and then the monorail to Haneda Airport.

There, I dropped into the mailbox right by the departures area our WiFi hotspot and its accessories into the postage-paid envelope that the company had included. So convenient!

Vannie wanted to take a shower but the Haneda shower room in Terminal 3 kept the weirdly inconvenient hours of 5 a.m. to noon daily and by then it was night time. So she bought entrance to the airport lounge so we could use its showers. It was my first time inside a lounge (and its showers), so a new and exciting experience for me.

While we waited for our flight, Vannie used the last of our yen to buy souvenirs for our coworkers. And then we were saying goodbye to Japan.