A trip to animal prison

I was dreaming again. It was a boring dream, something about a long school assembly. The head teacher was being called to the stage, there was a knock on the door and I opened my eyes, to see this:

I think millions of people must wake up to the same sight, their ceiling and an air conditioning unit.

It was 11:00AM and Anna was at my door. Anna is a Canadian girl who moved in about a week after me. The last time I had seen her she was ill but now she was up eager to go somewhere. She was standing fully attired even down to a baseball cap on her head and a bag over her shoulder packed ready for the day, I was in my pyjamas with hair pointing threateningly in all directions. She asked me if I wanted to do something today, I did but thought it a bit unfair that she had waited for the point of maximum difference in our readiness before asking me.

We decided to go to Ueno Zoo which is in Ueno Park, a very large and famous park in Tokyo, if you haven’t heard of it then it’s your own fault. What follows is a dilemma because I took about a million pictures but since you all lead far more busy and important lives than I do you won’t have time to look through a million photographs. So here is a whistle stop tour through Ueno Zoo and its animals.

It begins with fish kites over the door. Well no it begins with the ticket, it was 600yen, about £2.50. Now for the fish kites.

I really should find out what they are called, you do see them around quite often, they are very beautiful in the wind.


There were lots of birds, here are a few:

There was also one solitary squirrel in captivity and at the time it was asleep inside its little squirrel house. When we had seen all the animals, Anna said “Let’s see if the squirrel is awake yet,” it still wasn’t. I had never seen a sleeping squirrel before, it was extremely cute but unfortunately the picture is not that good because of pesky reflections in the glass.

Unless it is an obvious species like an ostrich or elephant I forget the names of the animals, so I am going to make them up instead.

This is John sitting having a rest.

Larry wished everyone would go away.

Mervin’s narcolepsy struck again.

Some of the birds in the park are free to fly around wherever they like. Some of the little ones are even small enough to get into the cages of other animals, so you end up with weird combinations of animals like a little harmless bird pecking around the feet of a golden eagle. Here is another strange combination.

Surely that’s never happened before.

Anna wanted to buy some animal ears so we spent some time seeing what we looked like with giraffe ears etc. She chose some red panda ears, by the way red pandas look nothing like pandas, and she bought me some regular panda ears. After that she insisted we wear them around the park, which was fine because I quickly forgot I was wearing them until I caught sight of my own shadow and had to stop and think about why something seemed to be wrong.

This is a picture of Anna in her ears (she is wearing a facemask too because she has a bad cold and it is what people do here).

And a self-portrait of me in mine.

At one point in the zoo you are greeted by a sign saying, “welcome to the world of darkness” which is the kind of thing you’d only expect to read on the escalator to Hell. There were all sorts of nocturnal animals living confused lives in there, including this creature, a Pallas’s Cat.

And this, a Lesser Mouse Deer.

I don’t know why they had meerkats in the dark but they did. Their enclosure was underneath a square opening in the roof and there was a small patch of sunlight shining down to them from above. One meerkat was standing above all the others staring up into the light as if it were having a religious experience. I guess it was actually performing its version of surveying the plains for predators.

Nick’s interesting facts: You may think that turtles and tortoises would get bored with their heads curled up inside their shells. Well, scientists have recently discovered that what stops most shelled creatures from getting bored is a widescreen television embedded into the inside wall of their shell. This tortoise is currently gripped by Diagnosis Murder and only comes out of its shell for an hour a day, to eat, excrete and during repeats of Open All Hours.

This is the line for the pandas. As well as the metal railing note also how the pandas have their own security guards, they are that endangered.

Finally, on the day I was there Ueno Zoo was also visited by a family of megaphones.

After the zoo we walked around Ueno Park a bit. There was a stall selling chocolate-coated bananas on sticks, but alas in my haste to eat one I forgot to take a picture.

I did take a picture of one of the lakes at the park, which contrasts somewhat with the high-rise buildings at its shores.

For possibly the first time in my life I saw the sun and the moon in the same sky. Anna refuses to be impressed by anything as it all reminds her of Canada anyway, she said she has seen the sun and moon together hundreds of times before. Maybe this is why Brits have such a history of travelling, our country is just so small. What do you think?