Sunday 12th April
Started the morning fairly early as my body clock is still adjusting to the different time zones of travel. Luckily, this is only 1 hour difference realistically, so it was good to go. We left our room around 8:30am to look for breakfast in the nearby Asakasa suburb that we were staying. Nothing was opened at this time, so we decided to try our lucky by going to our first stop of the day, Shibuya.
Metro ride there is rather close (all within the 160yen limit – within 5 stops) Eventually found ourselves walking in Shibuya district in what is considered early. Shops were only just starting to open up at 9am and the majority was expecting to open at 10am. Still looking for food, we walked around a couple of big blocks to find a small chain store that serves varieties of rice bowls. Seriously, this place was CHEAP. A Gyudon (beef rice bowl) that Kalin ordered was 250 yen or around $3 to the Aussie dollar (80 yen to $1). My grilled Teriyaki chicken bowl was a tad more expensive at 450 yen (served with egg) whilst Tom went the deluxe of the super special at 650 yen with a Gyudon, side salad and miso soup. Like wow.. $15 AUD for three people.. and we were damn full thereafter.
Shibya is a rather interesting place as it is suppose to be a very busy place – but because it was Sunday morning, the people was still quite sparse. However, it was starting to get a tad busy whilst we just went strolling around for opened shops. We eventually decided to walk to our next destination of Harajuku via the Meiji way.
To get here, we went through this park (so that we can see if we can find the blossoms), which was around 3 km away, so we trekked through to find a nice Sunday market next to the Nippon TV Broadcasting station. They sold all varietys of organic foodstuff in this market – ranging from the regular chinese type veges to Japanese local veges such as the local yam (that I only saw on Iron Chef episode). Tom could not resist and bought some very nice looking strawberries. People – when you are in Japan during spring, make sure you try the local produce of strawberries. It is dead set the best strawberries I have ever tasted with a BIG size, crunchy yet still full of strawberry flavour. To top it off, it tastes so sweet, it felt like the farmer grew it using syrup or something! This is in stark contrast to the Aussie ones that look fresh, massive (admit, bigger than the Japanese) but yet it has no taste but sourness.
The park also introduced us formally to the Cherry blossom trees (Sakura) – but we got here towards the end of the Sakura season (3 weeks), so a lot of trees already dropped their flowers already as the cherries bloom. About 1/3 the trees was still in bloom however, and managed to take some damn good shots of it all. The zoom comes handy as to get some really good close up of the flowers at hi-res (thanks 12mpix). When the wind came to blow the trees, the petals would fall off the flowers all over the place like snow fall. Beautiful..
The park was massive. I can swear we walked nearly 3 km all around the park or more. But the experience was very interesting to write about. Throughout the way, there were groups of Japanese people that were still celebrating the Sakura season by coming in groups and holding picnics under trees.. whilst totally getting smashed on Japanese beer and sake. The way to keep clean was that the group organisers would bring a big tarp mat to the grounds and pin it down by the edges. The people would enjoy their parties on here before the organisers will wrap up the tarp mats by the edges. Council flatbed tow trucks with hooks would come around and remove it later. The mats were pretty stinky since was full of empty alcohol bottles and Kalin even found piece of do-do in there hahaha. Dog? Human? Dunno.. :P
Funnier thing also was there were some models doing picture shots out in the park there (around 4 of them all up) and a row of photographers were in line to take pictures of them in flirtiest stances. Tom decided to join the queue to see if we can do the same thing, but were kicked out by their organisers. We believe that it was a professional shoot or something like an amateur club even, but because of language barriers, we just did not understand them. Hahah. But yes, the models were pretty hot to say the least and funny to get kicked out without knowing a word they are saying.
Other things in the park was a bike trail (which would have loved to bring Ethan to since he will go ballistic there) and a dog socialisation area where people would bring their dogs to for training and socialisation with other dogs doing err, what dogs normally do (arse sniffing, on heat etc).
The reason why we got so deep into this area was because Kalin and Tom were trying to locate the Meiji temple/shrine – one of the most famous in Tokyo. Whilst it said on the map that it was close, the temple was actually fenced off so when we were giving up to walk down to Harajuku, we eventually found the right entry into the temple that was another good 2km walk from the main entrance. Did the usual temple stuff (Wash hands, mouth then went inside, threw some money in, prayed etc). Very different from Chinese or other Asian temples with no incense lit, no idols to worship etc. Very blank and bland in comparison, but was still beautiful place to visit.
There was a wedding held here too and for some reason, they allowed tourists to photo their wedding.. hahaha.. so I managed to get some shots of what a traditional Japanese wedding looks like with the bride dressed rather like Queen Padame from Star wars (or actually the other way around since her costume design was based on wedding kimonos and make up.
Walking back out, we now walked down to Harajuku – a pretty nice shopping district MAINLY for the chicks. Walking past from the JR, is a street FULL of shops for the teenage chicks. This includes everything from clothing to the latest Japanese pop idol pictures. JPOP Music plays loudly and plenty of Dessert stores since girls love their sweets.
For a late morning tea snack, Kalin decided on going to one of these dessert stores with him and Tom ordering some Waffles and I ordered a double cheese cake. Waffle was great (as it is always when fresh), and the cheesecake was beautiful (two levels of cheese – top layer as a light sweet philli cheese and the bottom like a normal Japanese cheesecake style the you can buy in Sydney). Yum.
Spent the afternoon shopping in this district and walking.. and window shopping and walking etc. Lunch was a late at 3pm (since we did our dessert top up at midday) and decided to go to this place recommend by the “Tokyo Walker” TVB program. Was indeed very average and not as good as what the presenter says (hamburger steak). By this time, we took the Metro back to Shinjuku since Kalin was introducing us to his ex-colleague.
His ex-colleague (with her husband) took us around Shinjuku a little and took us to see the Pinchiko parlours. This game is crazily popular in japan with the main objectives to shoot metal bearings/marbles kind of like a normal pinball machine. The ball will then drop from above and through the different pins and wheels, would land in certain spots. You get credit when it lands into the right places (A ball is worth around 10yen or so). It is probably equivalent to the pokies in Australia. Kalin and Tom decided to have a go at this and for 1000 yen, they got around 5 minutes worth of Pinchiko pleasure of losing. Hahah. Full though since there were also a lot of people winning and they have literally trays of these metal balls all stacked up in the corridors that they had won. These balls are redeemable for cash or prize incentives.
She then took us to a very large video arcade place in Shinjuku where the boys played a game of Gundam. Gundam is a cultural anime in Japan (Japanese animation) and this game is big. The best thing is, you sit in a projected pod with a good rounded view of everything to give you a 3D sensation. Was very interesting and compared once again to Sydney where the video arcades have died over the years, it is still blooming in its native country of Japan. They have also managed to combine the recently popular card trading games into arcade ones (using RFID) to come up with strategy type arcade games based on collective cards. The controls are fairly basic with the player moving the cards between zones on a dedicated surface for different moves etc. Games of this type include everything from Three kingdom ones to Football (Soccer) management and even RPG games. Very interesting and really bringing back the days of my youth hanging out at Timezone or Galaxy Arcade centres.
Last leg of the day was to eat dinner and they took us to eat Tonkatsu meal (Fried pork chops). This was Yummy.. very yummy.. much better than Sydney’s offerings for sure.. hahaha. We then parted ways with Kalins ex-colleague and her husband, went back to Hotel via the Metro etc.
Been a long long day.. I think I walked in one day would be about the same distance that I would walk in Sydney in a whole month. My feet are so sore.. All in a days worth!
