This park is about a 25 minute subway ride south and 1 km from the station. We packed a lunch and headed off. We could have ridden our bikes...but I think we wanted a relaxing day. Anyway, the subway ride gave us time to read/play our gameboys. The weather looked great until we stepped out of the station and it started drizzling. Actually it was more like a misting. We seemed to be walking away from the rain but once we got to the park, the mist had turned into substantial drops. Good thing we didn't ride our bikes and that Ryan happened to have his umbrella in his backpack! (Was he a boy scout?)
I remembered that there was supposed to be a Salmon festival at the Living Museum of Salmon in the park so we made our way to the museum. Besides the fact that this event seemed interesting (I really want to see salmon swimming back upstreat!), a museum meant shelter and shelter meant being warm and drying off. When we got to the museum the rain wasn't so hard so we actually laid out our picnic tarp (picked up at the 100yen on the way because we forgot our usual tatami mat! oh the convenience of the 100 yen shop!) under the trees and ate our lunch.
After lunch, we walked around the festival. First thing we saw was a turtle race!! Much more exciting than it sounds, really! You'll see in the pictures that the blue turtle won, the red turtle didn't move at all (she was the oba-chan aka grandmother), and the yellow one, the tiniest turtle, made it half way and then decided to stare at us. Of course, since it was the cutest, the yellow turtle was the crowd favorite. After the excitement of the turtle race we walked around the museum, which had indoor and outdoor exhibits. There were some monster salmon there! They also had other river animals, like water beetles and crawfish and a variety of fish and frogs.
Overall it was pretty fun but I didn't get to see any wild salmon swimming upstream. I WILL see them one day!!
Enjoy the pictures:
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| Makomanai Park and Salmon festa |
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