Yesterday we started off visiting the Harajuku area. None of the cosplayers were around, but at the shrine next door we met a group of Japanese college students who offered to give us a free tour around the shrine grounds in exchange for getting to practice english with us.
A few notes on fashion here. You'll notice I'm wearing my new shoes - a pair of vibram five-fingers. I'm also wearing a Japanese Atari t-shirt that I got in Budapest, which was a big hit - I had at least 4 or 5 people random strangers comment on it through the day.
We wandered through the park and checked out a b-boy dance festival going on nearby, then headed over to Otemachi to see the palace gardens. There we ran into another group of university students offering the same deal as the ones earlier. It seems they are all part of an after school club to practice english. We probably didn't learn a lot more from then than we could have from just reading the plaques, but it was fun just to talk to them and discuss our lives.
Next was on to Akihabara to revel in its weirdness. We explored a massive electronics department store and had some yummy ticket machine lunch on the top floor, and checked out a few of the big manga/book shops and arcades.
There were also a few interesting themed cafes that weren't there last time.
Most of you probably won't understand these - but a few will.
As dusk fell we took the subway to Shinjuku to check out the lights of Tokyo by night. We had some dinner in the area, and had a polite little old woman stop us while she called a friend who spoke english so they could offer to hook us up with uhh... "special services", which we politely turned down.
Today was a bit slower paced. We went to Asakusa to visit the Buddhist temple Senso-ji and shop around in the area.
From there we walked to Sky Tree, which is a massive new tower that has been built since I was here last. We lost interest in visiting the observation deck when we saw the cost (and line), but checked out some of the shops in the base and had some lunch.
We hopped around to a few more places, but we mostly just looked around and I didn't take any more pictures, so I won't delve in more than that. Tomorrow I'm checking out and heading to Kawagachiko for the next stage of my Japan leg.
3 comments:
Gundam Cafe!
How are the shoes feeling? They're pretty cool--and the shirt!
For the same reason the shoes are good they also require a lot of breaking in. They force your feet to work more than they normally do, so wearing them for long stretches leaves my feet a bit sore. I think if I break them in slowly they'll do fine though.
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