We woke up around 9am, took showers and got dressed. We were able to check our e-mail and Facebook stuff from our iPads in the lobby. We walked around and found a post office where we were able to pull out 20,000¥. We re-parked the van across the street and walked around Shinjuku. I swear it looked almost cartoony sometimes:
We decided to buy all-day rail passes and used them to check out the different districts of Tokyo. First stop: Shibuya:
We walked the famous Shibuya crossing with the television screens in the buildings (which were difficult to capture with the camera).
We walked around the station and tried to find the statue of Hachiko. When we found it there was a very friendly Japanese guy with a megaphone who loved me and Michael and thought we were Dutch (not sure why he wasn't too keen on Billy, sorry Billy):
Everyone loooved Michael's shirt which said "Coca-Cola, sweet and refreshing" (or something like that) and they called him "Mr. Coca-Cola".
The story of Hachiko is, in 1924, a professor got Hachiko as his pet dog. The professor took the train to Shibuya after work every day, and Hachiko greeted him there and they walked home. They did the same thing every work day until 1925, when the professor had a hemorrhage on the train and didn't arrive in Shibuya. Of course, no one could tell the dog, so every day for the next 9 years Hachiko would wait for his owner at the train station (even when others tried to adopt him, he would escape and wait at the station). He would show up every day when his owner's train would be arriving and the station employees and commuters provided him with food and water while he waited, until he died. They built the statue to represent his undying loyalty.
We went to the station's mall and ate lunch went to a Cold Stone (I had green tea ice cream). They're are less focused on giving massive amounts of ice cream, and more on singing a song for each patron as they made it (very cute)! Interesting fact about Japan: They don't walk around with their drinks or food. Everyone sat down to eat their cones/cups and then got up and left. Good luck finding a trash can if you're walking around!
We wandered around for a little bit, then took the train to our next stop: Ahikabara district, famous for its electronics and cosplay (costumes).
We were pretty disappointed. We found out later, we went to the wrong areas at the wrong time of day. We hardly saw anybody in costumes and the way the electronic stores were set-up felt like a big swap-meet. They also had erotic anime statues and figurines which came off as skeezy instead of the usual interesting (I think this had to do with the fact that there were a lot of gai-jin looking at them not quite innocently, and the sheer number of the figures). We played around in an arcade but we were getting unhappy, hot, and tired, so we decided to move on to our next location: Ueno.
We walked from the station to Ueno Park (it was kitty corner from it). We saw the Shogitai Warrior Tomb:
and the Kiyomizu Kanno-Do buddhist temple. In front of the bigger temples we saw, there were places to wash your hands before you entered:
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but I did get the roof (I didn't get a good shot of the whole building though - at any rate we didn't spend a huge amount of time there):
We walked in the park and away from the temple, towards the Shitamachi Museum . Leading up to the museum were street vendors selling their wares.
Past the vendors, the road turned into a bridge and on either side were fields of lotus flowers (not in bloom).
As we got closer to the museum building, there were hundreds of giant carp (about a foot to a foot and half in length each) who were schooling coming out of the water, skimming the surface of some sort of pipe with their bellies, and going back into the water. They were pretty hypnotizing!
As we got to the museum building, which looked like this (but we didn't go inside):
There were some artifacts outside, such as this old shrine:
And a rock with handcarved kanji in it:
Here's what Billy's seeing:
Around the back of the museum there was Shinobazu Pond. There were many romantic Japanese people that day, renting paddle boats.
We took a relaxing stroll around the pond...
I think it will mean more if I just let the pictures show you our walk around the park...
We then walked back to Ueno station and took the long-way train ride back to Shinjuku. Our train (no, not the bullet train... yet):
Ride to Shinjuku:
We got there as the sun was setting, and we decided to check out the 13 floors of the nearby Takashinoya department store. We bought some toy cars, saw cool figures...
and the possibility to buy deep-water fish in a tube:
Then we decided to go out to dinner. We decided to go into the first hole-in-the-wall place we found, which was down some narrow stairs, but we got turned away (we started to get used to this, apparently... freakin Gai-jin not knowin when they're not invited..) We walked across the alleyway to this place (no, I don't know what it was called):
When we walked in we were pretty sure they wouldn't be able to speak English, but we were wrong. There was a tough middle-aged Japanese lady who spoke very broken, but fast, English and brought us a menu all in kanji. She brought us beer and a menu with pictures on it, we pointed to some different looking items. Turns out that they would bring the 3 - 4 dishes we ordered one at a time for us all to share, and bring out the next when we were all done with one.
The first thing we got was something like boiled vegetables..? It was gross and the boys started turning on me for choosing this place. However, the next few dishes (unfortunately my notes have failed me here...) were all very good. I do remember that one of the dishes were some sort of shish-kabob with different types of meat on each... there were about 8 between all of us and one of them had all liver, one had all cartilidge..? something? At any rate, we cleaned up.
We left the restaurant, left our thanks, and went to a nearby arcade. We played the drum game again, I beat Tetris, played some sort of game like 1945 (flying a plane over land while shooting), and Virtua Fighter 5 Showdown, then walked to Lawson's convenience store (a sort of 7-11 (they had 7-11s too)), bought ice cream, drinks, chips, and back to the hotel.
We watched English-with-Japanese-subtitles Iron Man 2 and Green Zone with Matt Damon. Geez Green Zone was a terrible movie.
P.S. If it seems like we did a helluva lot of walking in Japan, it's because we did a helluva lot of walking in Japan.
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