Op shops and electric town - Mon 31 Mar

Had delicious pork shoyu ramen for brunch near the hotel. Then we explored an op shop, and came across this very glamorous rack of second hand ski outfits :O

Walked to Akihabara, known as electric town. All this stuff has already been made, and is sitting there to be bought! Adult stuff is everywhere in Japan, in department stores, CD stores. Looked at cameras, mobile phones, headphones, and a furious, blinding, thunderous pachinko gambling room.

The model of mobile below has a screen that rotates sideways for internet browsing (shown) and widescreen TV (antenna shown).

Bert nicked off somewhere without letting me know where he was going, which was daunting - how do you find someone in Tokyo when neither of you know where you are or have mobile phones?? I managed to bump into him again after about half an hour, when I was nearly about to give up and go back to the hotel to wait.

We explored another Don Quixote discount department store and supermarket, this one HUGE. We went to a game centre and took some super fancy sticker photos - you can write all over them, and put decorations on them, on the screen, then they print out for you :) It was hilarious fun.

Sunday 25 - Shibuya

Had chirashi sushi for lunch, yummo. The market between Okachimachi and Ueno was bustling. I tried on some tshirts - they asked me to keep my own on underneath.

Some cutesy shoesies in a department store.

We went to to Shibuya, where there are big stores and masses of people. We only saw one strangely dressed girl in the park, but it was a rainy day, and darkening. There was a wanna-be girl-group performing in the park, and some ad-hoc tap-dancers. Wandered for ages in the park, trying to get to a famous shrine, but didn't find it. It was very beautiful in the foggy darkness. I saw my first big flowering tree, and there were the first groups of young people having hanami parties under the trees in the park. I had a hot choc and brownie at a department store in Shibuya, looking out from the 6th floor over a huge intersection bristling with neon, video and people.

I spotted this open special season on super boots

We made our way to Shinjuku3choume station, and found ourselves at a poky bar called Arty Farty for half an hour. Not the fanciest crowd! The last train home at midnight was rush hour, really quite amazing.

Bert arrives

I had a real workout getting to Ueno First City Hotel to meet Bert. It took about 90 minutes, with all the train shenanigans - always looking up the next station's name again, asking about train platforms and company line running the train and the direction of the train, and express/stopping and tickets.. Plus the lugging of the luggage up and down stairs and along the city streets of Ueno, while struggling with directions. It's a lovely thing to know where you're going.

It was great to see Bert. I'd forgotten his belly-laugh-inducing sense of humour.

The room feels vaguely 60s, in Japanese style with white walls and wood-panelling dividers and borders, futons on the floor with soba (buckwheat) husk pillows like beanbags, a little basket for your shoes, and a woven tatami floor.

We went for a long walk looking for food that excited. The signs advertising many businesses on each floor are becoming a familiar sight in Japan. When we went in, I thought they said "We have cable upstairs" but it was actually "We have table upstairs" - much less exciting :oD We had eel with spicy cabbage and bean shoots in a black stone meal-warmer, and a rice-and-cooked-things dish which Bert quickly mixed together, so I'm not really sure what was in it. It sat on browning cooked rice, and kind of tasted like a sauceless casserole.


We went into a bottom-end department store called Don Quijote and browsed for so long. There was a locked cabinet of second hand Louis Vuitton (and other fancy brands) bags. I bought a bad English tshirt.

Adult products are everywhere in Japan. This pretty Kmarty department store has a kinky outfit section next to the Calvin Klein undies.







Then we went to stare amazedly at a convenience store's wares, and made some "experiential" food selections. Dried carp horns, dried swordfish strips, bean buns, apple tea, dark chocolate and jellybeans. The dried fish stuff really felt like eating pet treats!

Novelty dogs

You've GOT to love a novelty dog. Because you know it's had a hard life in the schoolyard. This little boy had some lovely hair bobbles. He is one of many suupa-cutesy dogs I've seen here, where there seems to be a craze for tiny dogs with oversize ears and accessories. Little girls are encouraged into the cult with toy dogs in purses they can carry around - no doubt I'll soon enough spot this for real!

Supermarket tourism

OK, so if we saw this at home, with the roles reversed, we'd think it was some of the best finger-pointing material we'd ever seen. Picture tourists, running around a supermarket with cameras, photographing McCain TV dinners and lamb chops and Snickers Bars. But supermarket tourism was some of the best fun any of us had had thus far in Japan.

So, the TV dinners?


The lamb chops?

This is how awful we were. The supermarket checkout chick was not impressed by the time we bought our icecreams and left.

And the icecreams we bought were not flavours we'd ever seen before - interesting cultural variants!

They have Mickey Spam!

And green tea flavoured KitKats - there is green tea flavoured EVERYTHING here!

So we were awful foreigners, laughing crazily at chocolate bars, but my GOD it was fascinating fun!

Yakiniku, $1 draught, and night 3 of karaoke

We gathered a crew from the hostel for a dinner out of "yakiniku" or cooked meat. We we pleased to find that the draught beers were 100 yen, or about $1 each. We were not particularly restrained about it.


Linus cooks.


I am MUCH taller than the bathroom door. It's a squat loo, and the handwashing water fills the cistern - maybe useful in drought-stricken Melbourne?


We headed for a bar local to the hostel called Stella. I'd ended up at Stella the previous two nights (i.e. every night so far in Tokyo.) You buy drinks via tickets from a vending machine that you exchange at the little bar - one basic drink is 500 yen.

Conveniently, the bar also has free karaoke, and a huge selection of songs, including English songs. No-one ever claims to want to sing karaoke, or even to go, if they have never been before. Then they get there.

Anna Marie and I had been together on the first night, when we caterwauled our way through many previously great songs. She wasn't so hard to convince to get on the microphone nowadays.


"No way" was Steve singing karaoke. Till...


It took Kaey till this second night to get on the mic. The german boys were certainly not going to be singing, until they requested about half an hour of grunge, and 99 Luftballons came up.


Steve remembers little past this point, including meeting a fellow hostelier that he had a repeat conversation with the following day, or how he ended up with a bag of chips under his pillow. We managed to lose him as we left the karaoke bar, somehow, but his homing device was operating.


And this is what Japan's equivalent of fast food stomach calming looks like - stringy bits of bacon on rice, with some miso soup. Andy, closest, was regretting his nasty pre-packed food purchased outside, but only just, and his chopstick skills weren't holding out too well.


Everyone felt horrendous the next day, and plans for a pre-dawn trip to the fish market managed to fall through the cracks. Steve didn't surface until well into the p.m. :)

Ginza and the Sony building

Impressively shiny Ginza architecture.

Everything gets cherry-blossom themed in Japan at this time of year: the Sony product display centre complies.


This gadget in the Sony building tells you what's on what floor - you put the card in front of a camera, and it projects the floors on the screen. You "push" buttons on the card by waving your finger across them to step through menus and get information.


Among the more impressive gadgets were the high definition TVs (connected to cameras - your skin has never looked this flawed!), a demo game for the playstation 3, and the iPod nano-scale portable video playing devices. :O

Sushi train

The English folks were a bit reluctant to try funny foods - Steve didn't fancy raw fish or egg, and Anna-Marie generally dallied around anything unfamiliar but then always found it delicious - except for the bamboo shoots, which I agree, when chewed too much, taste like the smell of crushed centipedes.

Imperial gardens

At the imperial gardens with fellow backpackers Linus and Andy from Germany, Anna-Marie from London via Australia, and Steve from London.

Camel toe

One of the human rickshaw pullers, or "jinrikusha". They wear unusual camel toe shoes :)

Sensouji temple, Asakusa

This remarkably beautiful temple was only minutes' walk from my backpacker accommodation in Tokyo.

They even provided artificial cherry blossoms for the tourists - barely a blossom was blooming yet in Tokyo when I took the floral picture here.

It was also beautifully lit at nighttime.

Love hotel La Cachette

An easy landmark to help spot my backpacker accommodation for the first four nights in Tokyo at Sakura hostel was the neighbouring love hotel. It would have made the directions to the backpacker's much easier.

The glorious, glowing love hotel pulses with colours that flow up the building's facade.

The welcoming entranceway.


The menu board. A decent night for the La Cachette, as most of the rooms are blacked out, i.e. currently taken.


Some flashy interior design in the foyer.


I took someone from the hostel for a look the next night, and although no-one is in the foyer to observe the guests and make them feel awkward, a nervous-looking middle-aged Japanese woman appeared and stuttered out to us, "No foreigners, only Japanese." She seemed very grateful when I explained I was only having a look for curiosity's sake. They have security cameras on everything, everywhere in Japan!

First posts

I'm going to pop up a retrospective to get my new blog up to scratch, now that I've figured out how to make the menus in the blogging site realise I need English, even though I'm in Japan. Here are some pictures and findings from my first week in Tokyo. Yokoso!