This Saturday, me and my colleague decided to go on a hanami (yes, another flower viewing) and café hopping, but this time it’s at Kiyosumi Shirakawa, a small area that’s located 30 minutes from where I live.
It’s my first time visiting Kiyosumi and it’s a surprisingly lovely area with lots of private owned businesses scattered around the area. We met up at 10 PM near the subway station and immediately started walking to the first coffee shop we discussed beforehand the other day.
The weather was exceptionally good that yesterday’s rainy day almost seemed like a lie. It wasn’t too cold and the sun’s on the stronger side, but not to the point we feel both cold and hot at the same time.
We first went to a coffee shop that is located inside Tokyo Bike, a store famous for selling bicycles. Unfortunately, they only sell either hot black coffee or cold milk coffee. No, there’s no hot milk coffee. The owner said that they want to focus on serving good black coffee, hence the limitation on the menu. I feel that they’re missing a business opportunity… But I guess I can’t criticize people for what they want to do with their shop.
So we went to our next destination, Blue Bottle Coffee, a famous coffee shop chain in Japan. The store has a lot of adorable goods that tempts me into buying them. But I resisted. I got myself a classic café latte and a limited edition vanilla saffron cookie. We couldn’t dine inside since it was full, but there was an outdoor bench, so we drank and ate there while basking in the sunlight. We spent a good one hour there just chatting and eating.
After we’re done, we decided to visit our main destination for the day, the Kiyosumi Teien (lit. Kiyosumi Gardens).
It costs 150 yen to enter the garden, which was really cheap. There weren’t as many visitors inside as we expected, so it was a nice surprise. It wasn’t noisy, and we could enjoy the view peacefully without feeling rushed. There’s a pond located in the middle of the garden and it unexpectedly has a lot of fishes and turtles inside.
We circled the garden until we found a small separate area that we could enter. We expected cute little flowers, but what we discovered was something even more breathtaking than that.
The picture I took couldn’t do any justice compared to what we actually saw. I actually held my breath for several seconds due to how big the tree actually was (and because I have pollen allergy lol). We took lots of pictures here before leaving with a feeling full of satisfaction.
When we finally left the garden, it was already lunch time, but the cookies we ate earlier was unexpectedly heavy. So we decided to have a light snack at Cafe Kiyosumi. It’s called a cafe, but it’s actually famous for its onigiri. I got salmon filled ones. The soup was warm and hearty too.
We explored more of the stores in the area after we’re done before deciding to call it a day. My friend had to kill some time because she has another appointment, so we did it together by entering McDonalds and munching on some fries. We exchanged the pictures we took and she printed the one she took of me using a polaroid printer!
This is definitely going into my collection of polaroids to be looked back upon in the future.
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