Plum Festival in Mito

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From late February to the end of March, when the plum blossoms are in bloom, the capital of the Ibaraki prefecture, Mito, has a festival to celebrate plums.

From my city to Mito, it takes about 3 hours by the limited express train. When they say "limited express" they really mean it's limited, as it stopped quite frequently. We arrived in Mito around 10:30 in the morning, and instead of taking the train over one stop to the Kairakuen (the large garden in Mito) we decided to walk along the lake. It was quite a nice walk, with various flowers in bloom, and swans swimming in the lake. As we approached the garden we could see the Plum blossom trees and regained our excitement(the long train ride drained us of most of out excitement). This garden is said to have 3000 plum blossom trees and is one of the "Three Great Gardens" of Japan.

Seeing as the trees had been in bloom for a few weeks now, they weren't as full as they probably could have been, but nonetheless they were beautiful. We wandered around the park and made our way over to the Kobutei, an old building where Nariaki Tokugawa spent much of his time. The 3rd floor of the Kobutei had a nice view of the park and the surrounding area (unfortunately one big tree blocked the best view of the plum blossom trees in the park...). After the Kobutei, we walked by the bamboo forests, and into the plum blossom forest. This forest was amazing! Plum blossoms have a very nice, sweet smell, so naturally with an entire forest of them the air smelled very nice. Upon exiting the forest there were a few food stands and shops selling various plum-related items. My friends and I each bought a bottle of sweet plum wine, and I was tempted to buy a tiny plum blossom tree but at 3000 yen a piece (and it looking rather awkward and heavy to carry) I decided against it.

We made our way back to the main entrance of the park, where we sat down and had some plum ice cream. It was...interesting. When eating something related to plum in Japan, one has to be very careful. Plum here is not the same as plum in North America, as it can have a rather odd flavour (if you've ever tried umeboshi (pickled plum), which is a favourite in Japan, you'll know what I mean). After that we checked out the small shrine beside the park, where there was a monkey trainer making her (his? I'm not entirely sure) monkey perform tricks. After watching that for a minute we decided it was time to leave the park and return to the station.

The train ride going home was worse than the train ride there. We were all tired, and about to fall asleep when we were woken up and told we had to move to the next car (this is about an hour into the trip). So we got up and moved to the car in front of ours (we were the last ones in the train...) and of course because we were in the unreserved seating cars and because we were the last ones to switch cars...we didn't get a seat in the new car. We had to wait about 45 minutes before any seats cleared up and we could sit down. The last hour of the trip went by fairly quickly after that and we were all happy to be off the train and home.

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