Today was a very nice day, with a bright yellow sun, and for the first time some blue sky. We started off on a late day to allow Melissa's foot a little while to rest, as it was to be a long day of walking through Ueno Park - Tokyo's largest park.
The goal was to try and view the park's cherry blossom trees, it's semi-large zoo and the very large Museum of Natural history. Of these three we managed to complete one and a half.
The museum was instantly out of the question due to the fact that they are closed every Monday. With all the planning that I did beforehand we finally came across something unexpected - oh well, we'll just see it later on.
The cherry blossoms were not in full effect yet, which I could have figured out if only I paid more attention to the weather reports. You see, the weather girl each morning lets you know: A) What type of weather you are going to have. B) How hot and cold it will be. C) What percentage of cherry blossoms have bloomed. It's a weird thing to show at that time but people seem to take them pretty serious.
Although the blossoms weren't in full effect there were still a lot of great things we were able to see and do.
First off there were lots of temples and shrines in the park. Some of them had gongs you could ring, and incense you could burn. Others had room for you to tie on a prayer. All of them though had a place to wash your hands, rinse out your mouth, and toss a coin in for a prayer.
All the buildings were several hundred years old and looked like they have been preserved in great condition. Friendly monks waited inside some of them to sell you prayer scrolls that you could tie outside of the building, or a wooden plate that you could use to ask "the gods" for luck.
Oh, and as an odd side note we were approached by a "Japanese" man from Buffalo, NY. He wanted to know if we had heard of, "The Family International." Guess what, random knowledge prevails, and I did happen to know about them. They are a cult - a cult that kidnaps the children of those who try to leave it. I promptly rejected him and left as fast as possible.
After receiving our fill of water features, temples and shrines we headed into Ueno Zoo to see what they had to offer. In general there was only the standard fair, with the exception of a couple of rare birds, a red panda and a armadillo on steroids. It was a nice zoo though, with lots of little kids running around. Japanese kids really are the cutest.
Good views, good weather, and a good vegetarian dinner made for a very good day. Click here to see a small sample of all the pictures we took today.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Uppercut!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Harajuku Girls
Today's post shall be rather short, as I find myself to be rather tired at the moment. It's weird being tired at 7:00 at night, but I guess if you think about it, we really have been messed up by the 8 hour time change.
This morning we woke up and had yet another wonderful breakfast at Starbucks, which I found out serves pancakes here. Seeing how it was a Sunday morning, which is a non-work day for a large portion of the city, they were actually pretty full. Fortunately we were able to your superpower of blessed timing to get in just before they ran out of seats.
With food out of the way we headed on over to the Yamanote line as we had before, but this time we were going to travel couter-clockwise and head on over to Harajuku, supposed home of the Harajuku Girls from Gwen Stephani fame. By the way, somebody really needs to give her a call and let her know that Harajuku Girls don't really exist much anymore. They aren't all gone, but there certainly aren't many.
As you will note from this photo there is a lot of people...a whole lot. It seemed like everywhere you turned you were either cutting so
mebody off, or you were being cut off. The stores were about 15 feet wide and usually had three or four stories jam packed with 5' tall tweens. Lining the walls were a copious amount of clothing with horribly incorrect
English sentences, as I will post below.
By the time we reached the end of this main street, known as Takashita Dori, it was apparent that a break was needed. Melissa's foot had been hurting her rather bad, so we decided to turn around and head back to the hotel to wrap it up.
Eventually we managed to wrap it up and get some lunch in our bellies, from which we decided to try and set out again. This time our destination was Shibuya to go to the flagship store for Tokyu Hands.
Thanks to Google Street View we were able to easily find our way, but not before smashing into an intersection with made Harajuku look as if it had tons of space. The store it'self was even more massive then I had expected, with seven main floors, and three sub floors each, for a total of 21 stories.
After shopping we stopped on by a place called "Shakey's Pizza" - and yes, I know, we are in Japan, we shouldn't be eating Pizza, but I don't care. The place was dead, well until this teeny bopper girl stepped in and talked with the host. Somehow she signaled that she was going to be brining in a party bus full of people, because out of nowhere there were about 30 people coming in the door.
And this ended our day. Melissa's foot was in horrible pain and we decided it best to call it a night. As I leave you though I inite you to enjoy a lot of really fun pictures from our day out: click here
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Saturday, March 28, 2009
Akihabara - Electric Town
Today was our real first day getting to travel about Tokyo, and our first stop was to be Akihabra - the Electric Town.
Bright and early around 8:00 we set forth from our hotel to catch the Yamanote train line. Much like everything else here it was a breeze to find, and very simple to catch.
The biggest surprise actually was the fact that there was practically nobody around. Nothing like the videos at all.
We traveled from station to station, each about three minutes apart, all featuring their own song when you arrive until eventually we made our way to Akihabara.
The station here, like the others, was well labeled, leading us in the right direction to our first store, Yodobashi Camera. On the outside the store looks huge, but once you get inside of those 9 stories of goodness you really realize just how big it is The store was full of everything you could ever want, rather that be a hand-made minture piano, or a bicycle made by GMC, it's all here.
Below is a small sample of some of the more bizzar things that I found while looking around, you can view the rest at the bottom of the page:
With a nearly full day spent walking around this district we called it good, packed up the horses and set out on the Yamanote for home. Remember how I said before that the train wasn't busy? Well guess what? That's right, in the afternoon things seem to change quite a bit. Not only was it packed, it was packed full of a wide variety of people.
There were children wearing outfits from the Newsies, young girls with socks and open toed high-heel shoes, older women in kimonos, and last, but not least, there were lots of old men who seemed to like to glare at me. Thankfully it hadn't managed to get to the height of crazyness that youtube would show you, but it still was a little too close for comfort.
In fact, all the time I feel as if things are too close for comfort. I'm not a giant here, but I'm still much larger than 90% of the people. This has caused me to get use to using the phrases, "sumimasen," and "gomen nasai" a lot (that's "excuse me" and "sorry).
Constantly I'm bumping into people, and in fact I elbowed a lady in the face today. I felt horrible and before I could manage to think about what to say she appologized to me and went on her way.
So, besides smashing into people, finding little to nothing to eat, and almost getting lost finding a market, today was a really fun day. I just love everything here makes me laugh, rather it be the advertisments or the doorways that are too short for me, it's all a great laugh.
If you would like to continue laughing with me I suggest you check out this link to all of our photos from today: CLICK HERE
Food Sucks
First and foremost I must ask everybody to pray for Melissa. Today when walking through a store she stepped on a weird metal plate which caused her to have some pretty bad pain and a little bit of swelling. Right now walking is difficult and causes her to cry. I hate that. So, our hopes are that she will be healed in the morning.
Second most, you may also want to pray for the both of us to find some food. Seriously, the food here all seems to look like it could be edible but for some odd reason they have decided to throw in one really odd ingredient, and a whole lot of really odd smells.
From starters, they don't really serve breakfast here. The same resturaunts which were serving dinner last night were open bright and early to serve it again in the morning. As a result this we decided to stick with a great American staple - Starbucks - where we enjoyed White Mochas and lemon poppy seed pound cake.
Lunch was a different story all together. Above I give you exibit A. This is the menu for a lovely resturaunt that has decied that food safety really isn't something that you need to take seriously, as can be seen from the fact that it serves all of it's meats raw. Yum!!
It seemed like everywhere we went there was either some odd twist on the food rendering it rather ditasteful. Maybe with time we'll learn to cope, but for now it looks like we are stucking trying to find american food chains that don't force you into eating something with eyes still attached.
Oh, and as side note, you prolly won't belive this, but McDonalds ran out of food today. You actually couldn't eat order anything that used standard beef. Crazy huh?
Friday, March 27, 2009
Look around
Want to really see what it is like here? Make sure you have the flash plug-in installed and then check this out in full screen by clicking on the "full screen" button in the image. Once it is open you can drag the mouse around to see things.
Shinjuku Station south exit in Tokyo
Pretty cool huh? This is the south exit of Shinjuku station, which is the busiest one here in Tokyo. It is just a stones throw (if you are a Nephlim that is) from our hotel.
