Ueno Park - Tokyo

Again, a "past due" posting... In late August, I went to Tokyo for the afternoon and toured around the Ueno Park area. A beautiful park and one of those "I want to come back here" places. That list is filling quicker than I expected. Ueno Park is in the northeast part of the city and is a beautiful (and large) inner-city park amongst the high-density office and residential towers of Tokyo. Also, much like the National Mall in DC, it is home to many of the national museums - Tokyo National Museum, National Science Museum, Tokyo Museum of Art, Tokyo Zoo, etc. I only had time to visit the Tokyo National Museum - and then only the ground floor of that one. They had a great exhibit of Buddhist artifacts and showed how historians and anthropologist were able to use these artifacts to trace Buddhism's spread from India through China and Korea and ultimately to Japan. Ueno Park was also an 'oasis' for residents of Tokyo during the Great Fire of 1927 (? - don't quote me on the year) and also a tent city during the bombings of WWII. Since nearly all buildings at that time were wood structures, fire swept through the homes and businesses quickly due to the high density - and the only open space in which to retreat was the park where people lived for months, if not years.