A Blog Abroad

Tokyo: the last leg of our trip. It’s always refreshing to spend some time visiting my old favorite spots, finding new ones, and visiting with friends. In Tokyo, we were flung head-first into one of Japan’s national sports: find-a-trash. Japan does not have many public trash cans. Usually, they’re on the station platform. If you’re lucky, vending machines will have a recycling bin next to it. People just carry their trash with them here. It’s a great game. Rhett loves it, and only slightly sarcastically.

Anyhoo, brace yourself for a spicy-brained recap of The (new) Things We Did.

We are staying out in Asagaya on the west side, which is exemplary of a normal urban Tokyo neighborhood. This is the one part of the trip that we didn’t splurge on, and I’m happy we stayed out in a normal neighborhood, away from tourists. Our apartment has only one place for Rhett to hit his head, but sadly no couches for him. Staying out in the relative burbs is a great way to truly get a feel for the place – I always recommend this to first time visitors. Also, it’s cheaper.

Asagaya has a lot of foreigners living in it and it’s dotted with covered shopping arcades, coffee bean roasteries (more on this in a hot second), cafes, and small restaurants and izakayas that seat about 10 people. There are no sidewalks, you just walk chaotically in the street and I guess move over if a car comes along.

I’m still mad at american suburbs. You can walk to anything you need easily in Asagaya. I hate the car-centric culture pervasive in most of America.

It’s maybe about time for me to mention that Japan, and Tokyo in specific, has an absolutely killer cafe culture. If you are following along on my instagram, you have likely noticed that I post a lot of coffee shop pics. I really love cafe culture around the world and we’ve had some incredible lattes and coffees on our trip. Generally I am a coffee person in Europe, but in Japan, I usually get milk tea when we go to cafes.

On that roasty note, I bought some hand-roasted coffee beans from a shop in Asagaya. I was lazy with reading and thought it was a cafe and was surprised when I entered. As a midwesterner, I was feeling some guilt over entering and then leaving right away, so I decided why the heck not – time to buy beans. 

The drawback to this decision is that I have absolutely no words to express how I might want my coffee beans, outside of “whole beans” and “that one in the middle.” I managed to bungle through picking medium roast, whole bean, gimme that recommended one. Look sir, I don’t know what I’m doing so just tell me when to return. I got the beans. I will report back on their deliciousness.

And get yourself some roasted beans when you go to Tokyo. You can clearly just point at what you want.

Beans aside, here are the new & notable things we did and their relative neighborhoods. Other Tokyo posts can be found here, including day trips to surrounding areas.

Harajuku

We’re gonna dive into the notable category: my favorite Tokyo street food is the humble rolled crepe. We got two on our trip. Best ones are in Harajuku as they are its Thing, but you can find them a lot of places in the city too.

My book told me that there are a few farmers markets around the city, and Harajuku has a big one in front of united nations university every saturday & sunday. It’s exactly what you would expect from a farmers market, plus FOOD TRUCKS! Yeah!

Rhett’s best coffee of the trip was from a truck here. I got a galette. I resisted the siren song of buying gourmet mustards. There was also a vegan ramen stand.

Meiji Jingu in Harajuku is one of the big inner city shrines. Highly recommend a visit as an entry to going to shrines around the country. This one is a shinto shrine.

Since my last visit in 2018, they opened a museum nearby. The museum explains why the heck there is a forest with ancient trees in the middle of Tokyo, which was destroyed in WWII. Spoiler alert, over 10k trees from around the country were sent here in the 50s to rebuild it. It also teaches you about various holidays at the shrine, which is neat. Great intro, totally worth visiting.

If you want to know how to kidnap me, one of the methods you might use would involve luring me into an exhibit about historic clothing or textiles. The Meiji Jingu museum currently has a temporary exhibition on Empress Shoken’s haute-couture dresses from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The late Meiji era into the Taisho era is one of my favorites as far as art + culture goes, as you get this incredible mash-up of Japanese culture with Western fashions and styles and the two cultures trade influences heavily. Commodore Perry comes a-knockin’ and it’s a period of big change for Japan. (They also choose to copy the West’s hobby, colonization, but we aren’t here to talk about that today. Nobody likes it)

Also, Empress Shoken was like maybe, maybe 4’6”. She was so very petite. The big dress they had on exhibit took five years to hand restore. Amazing.

Shibuya

Huge Nintendo store! It’s no different really from the one in Kyoto, but the Parco building is a cool place to browse for goods, and you can walk up the outside. Shibuya is, in general, great architecture, good shopping, great walking.

Ueno

The equivalent of the minnesota state fair, the great get-together, is undoubtedly cherry blossom viewing season in Japan. People congregate in parks, spread a tarp, and share food, dango, and drinks. I have a picture from 2008 of a naked guy splashing in Yoyogi park’s fountains. It was an accident. I kept the picture.

Anyway, it was nuts to butts peak cherry blossom madness when we were in Ueno Park on Sunday so we left for Yanaka cat town. The upside of hanami madness is that there are extra trash bins in parks, which means that we can actually find easy places to throw our things away.

Any time of the year, you can go to the zoo – it’s only 600 yen to enter and has a lot of different animals that we don’t see at home. Rhett loved the amphibians house with the biiiig african bullfrog. If you go towards the end of a weekday, you can see the pandas with no wait!

As I am taller than 90% of the people looking at the panda, this is a great advantage.

Yanaka cat town

We walked here from Ueno because it was bananagrams with Hanami on Sunday. I saw no real cats, but it was a fun walk through an old Tokyo neighborhood. It was filled with a wonderful amount of kitty cat shops, souvenirs, used clothing, and all manner of cat-shaped foods and statues. It was a fun walk and a good meander if you are into cute things or cats or, preferably, both.

Also in Yanaka, I got to achieve one of my dreams: shokupan french toast!! This cafe we went to was above a pottery shop. To visit the cafe, you talk to a guy who looks like he’s minding the pottery shop. It felt like a weird scam to sell us some pottery. I wouldn’t be mad. 

Anyway my Shokupan had sakura cream, sakura ice cream, and came with a sakura float. 

And on the way out, we stumbled across some bloomy bois next to a graveyard.

Asakusa + the Sky Tree

That heading could be a Ghibli title. These are two areas of Tokyo close together, so they make sense to explore on the same day. I went here twice because I don’t like to be logical. Walking around Asakusa along the river is especially good right now, with the cherries in full bloom. You can take a Very Japan Picture with the blooms, the sky tree, and the golden poopy. Also, there are river cruises if you are so inclined (I was not).

The Sky Tree is a newer contraption. It did not exist when I left Japan in 2008 and then existed when I came back in 2012. It’s 3000 yen to go up to the top and I almost never do this type of thing because I don’t feel like spending the money on it. But it’s a clear day and the Yen is weaksauce, so we do this thing. Going up to the highest deck was the right choice because it’s a lot less crowded and is more peaceful. It’s definitely super touristy though, so it’s crowded here even over the lunch hour.

On the day I went to Asakusa, it was a serious kind of Tokyo rain – where you must have an umbrella or perish, but it’s also raining sideways, so you perish anyway. I spent extra time exploring the shops here because Rhett stayed home on this day. I picked up some traditional hair pins and I got myself a haori (kimono jacket), both of which I had been jonesing for since Kanazawa. My haori is a used silk one and was only 5500 yen. 

It’s the perfect place to shop and visit the shrine (free!) – especially if you want just some generic Japan souvenirs. I’ve found the prices here are pretty good comparatively for souvenirs.

Ikebukuro

Way more nerdy shopping has cropped up here. We skipped the aquarium sadly but I had a fun time diddling around in the Pokemon Center with its associated cafes and Pokemon Go center. The outside of Sunshine City has a cute little fairy village that I loved.

The final highlight though was enjoying the wonderfully creative mind of my friends’ kiddo, who taught us how to dance party to clean up natural disasters and, in a final act of selflessness, put their soul in a gun and fired their soul at a fireball to save the world.

As you do.

Monday was rain – all day – as Typhoon #5 (aka Mambo) moved through, dumping sometimes torrential rain on the metro area. I was ready – I was armed with my penguin umbrella and….my shoes weren’t quite dry from Kamakura. Flip-flops it is, I guess. I’m still ready.

Shibuya is a great place for shopping and people-watching. Because of the heavy rain from Mambo, it’s mostly a people-watching day. But first: Don Quixote for souvenirs (lovingly referred to as Donki, which is not the donkey from Shrek nor a donkey named Hote). I planned on picking up a few flavors of crazy kit-kats like wasabi or sweet potato.

In the past year or so, Japan has gone crazy with speciality kit-kat flavors. There were at least 20 to choose from. The winner for strangest overall flavor goes to wasabi (which we’ve had before, and it is as strange as it sounds, but not spicy), and the winner for the most oddly specific flavor goes to red bean sandwich (not red bean, red bean sandwich). They also had some artsy hot springs super green tea ones with cats on them, and sake (which I grabbed).

Donki is much cheaper than many other shops, and the mega store has a great collection. I picked out my jillion flavors in bags and was on my merry and kit-kat encumbered way.

I wandered the very wet streets for a bit and when the downpour became too much, I settled in to watching people cross in Hachiko crossing from the Tsutaya Starbucks.

There was a very long line despite the rain to take a picture with the Hachiko dog statue – which is a statue placed to commemorate a very loyal dog who returned to the station to wait for his master every day for nine years while his master never returned. If you would like to shed a tear, he has a wikipedia article.

After becoming mostly drenched, I met up with friends in Ikebukuro to go do something indoors – an aquarium! I’ve never been to the Sunshine Aquarium (and indeed because Ikebukuro is on the other side of Tokyo from where my commuter pass was, I’ve not been there too many times before).

Sunshine Aquarium is located on the top floor of the Sunshine City shopping complex. Despite its name, the sun was definitely not shining, nor did the name appear to be a ward against the rain in favor of the sun. Oh well. The aquarium was not horribly busy, and for the price had a lot of pretty cool fish from around the various seas!

They had a lot of frogs as part of a Frog Rangers exhibit (some kind of children’s show, I suppose). The frogs were pretty amazing – they had a lot of poison dart frog colors and sizes.

The aquarium also had a nice outdoor area, with high areas for the seals to swim in, and a grassy penguin enclosure where you could get quite close. Due to the horrible weather, nobody was out there – we had the penguins all to ourselves! They didn’t seem too fussed by the driving wind and rain.

After Sunshine Aquarium, we were obligated to visit the Pokemon Center, the one in Sunshine City being the largest one. Of course, I gave Nintendo my money.

After Pokemon Center, I was graciously invited to my friend’s house for a delicious home-cooked meal of Mabo tofu. I even acquired the recipe – yesssss.

Tuesday was my last full day in Tokyo. Somehow the rain has stopped, but heat took its place (of course). I swam my way through the humidity to my alma mater to purchase some goodies. There was a sign at the gate requiring guests to register with the guard…but even after a quick chat with the guard, he seemed to not care at all and I tromped my way to the school store and back. They lacked mugs and it was upsetting.

I wanted to stay indoors as much as possible today, so I met up with friends at Odaiba, home of a giant mall and a big Gundam statue (also a statue of liberty because reasons). The Diver City mall (yes – diversity – a thing Japane does not have) is a large American-style mall, filled with floors of stores and restaurants. Malls seem to be dying out in America, but doing well over here. This one’s draw is obviously the giant Gundam, so I suspect it will be around for a bit.

And for my final dinner, more ramen from that wonderful mom and pop shop I found with my Yotsuya-living friend. Tomorrow I have just a half day left before heading home 🙁

I will leave you with these $6 teeny pineapples I found in the grocery store.

When Japanese people have umbrellas, you should always take an umbrella, even if the weather seems fine. Corollary: if you don’t see any clear convenience store umbrellas, it’s probably just going to be a sunny day, and you can forego the umbrella. Today, it was just the latter – many ladies with umbrellas. Foolishly I left my sunhat at home. I would regret this.

The news people have been very excited over the start of the rainy season and the approach of the typhoon. I learned from the extremely dedicated weather lady that the rainy season is triggered by hot air from the Philippines charging up and adding moisture to the air as it moves north to Japan. Before typhoons approach, it gets hot. Really hot. Minnesota summers have nothing on the sauna of oppression that is Japanese summer. And this isn’t even the worst of it yet!

I meant to go to Shinjuku Garden this morning, which google told me was open all the time. Somehow I forgot it was a gated garden with operating hours (and you have to pay to get in), so when I left for my 630 AM early morning walk to do something that was not being in my room, I disappointedly found it was closed. Should have gone to Ueno instead! I wanted some serious hydrangeas.

From my long walk to Shinjuku along the garden path, I was at least able to see a few hydrangeas, and it was shaded from the inferno that was the 7am sun.

From Shinjuku, I went over to Ueno park, which would definitely be open before 9 am as it has no gates. When I arrived, it was already getting crowded with people who were eager to get in to the zoo, which opened at 10. It’s the panda’s first birthday soon and panda mania is beginning to take over! I, however, did not have panda mania, and while Shan shan is very cute, I am not gonna be in the hot sun more than necessary.

Instead, I explored the park’s various shrines and numerous hydrangeas.

From Ueno, I went to Asakusa for food and Sensoji shrine. Asakusa is always crowded with people – there are many covered streets with Japanese souvenir shops – artsy and traditional alike. The street food is tasty and numerous. Really, most people come to see the big shrine and go shopping. Despite the oppressive heat, it was packed.

After nearly melting and dying in the heat, I went to Akihabara, home of electronics and a veritable nerd’s paradise, to finish shopping and hit up some of my favorite stores.

Akiba on the weekends is packed with people there to see the sights and to browse wares, from secondhand electronics to figures and memorabilia from games, shows, and anything else people geek out over. I really enjoy browsing the figure and comic shops in particular.

I became extremely burdened with very large bags towards the end of my shopping run. I awkwardly bonked many people on my way to the station, and nearly sat on a small child on the train who darted around the bags to steal one of the only seats that popped up. He was admonished by his mother. There is justice in this world.

And last but not least…rounded out the day with some extremely good yakiniku with a former coworker! For dessert, we had gyoza from a gyoza place in Shinjuku called Shibuya gyoza, which was delicious and cheap, despite its very confusing name.

Japan in June: Hydrangeas! Also Japan in June: rainy season. Today the weather ladies announced the official start of the rainy season just in time for my arrival. Big rain is coming this weekend. Neat! I can’t wait to see the daily interviews with people talking about the rainy season (and hydrangeas or rainboots). I think by the end of the trip I will be seriously upset I removed my garden rainboots from my luggage at the last minute.

Any flight longer than five hours borders on intolerably boring. The direct flight to Haneda was about 11 hours, and at least I got lucky in that we had nobody in the middle seat in our row. The guy on the end seemed to be a good sport when it came to me and my combo of tiny bladder and bottomless tea and water intake during the flight. The middle seat became my foot seat and I was able to be somewhat comfortable for most of the flight (amazing!).

During the 11 hours I also decided I would never fly again without my tiny pink sparkle slippers with me. My feet always freeze on planes for any kind of long-haul trip but this time, they were cozy and nice (and they sparkled).

For the entirety of the flight, I for some reason had the Space Jam song in my head (brain tumor? likely that), and therefore I was jazzed to take a picture of the first welcome to Japan sign I saw.

Haneda only has welcome to Tokyo signs! What country is this even?! I didn’t get to make my Space Jam joke and satisfy whatever part of my brain got that stuck in my head in the first place. Space Jam song, you will be my curse to bear the rest of the trip. Probably.

My Air B&B is in Yotsuya, very near where I went to college here. Unfortunately for my directionally challenged self, the ABB was in a direction completely unfamiliar from school (possibly near the bar where we Got Very Drunk one night and missed the last train. Long walks ensued and how would I even remember this place with all the shochu we had?).

Surely I would be able to make it to the ABB without an umbrella. It’s only seven minutes walking (if you are adept which I definitely am not). Alas, I forgot the power of Japanese rain, which is a very serious kind of rain in the rainy season. It started down pouring two seconds out of the station and I ran into a family mart to pick up what is probably the hundredth shitty conbini umbrella of my life. After minimal bumbling and hulking my relatively light luggage up three flights of stairs, I arrived!

This ABB is very cozy – but anything in the middle of Tokyo will be. Because we are in Japan, it came with a deadly low lantern which I have bashed my head into several times already. The entire apartment is perhaps the same size as my bedroom at home!

Harajuku’s Takeshita street called me through my jet lag and resistance to sleep, brightly lit and filled with umbrellas in the pouring rain. My true destination: cute socks and crepes.

After my traditional purchase of adorable socks, I headed to Angels Heart as is the way of my crepe-eating people. Sweet, delicious angels heart – you are the best crepes in the land. The last time I was here, I had some kind of strange upset stomach and wasn’t even hungry. Not today!

After stuffing my face with what was probably my twentieth meal in the last zillion hours I have been awake (what is sleep??), I took my zombie self over to nearby Meiji shrine. It was a ghost town – almost no tourists in the rain. The walk through the tunnel of tall trees felt like to took forever, and the sound of the pouring rain on the nearby forest was relaxing. If it was not wet everywhere maybe this would be a nice place for a nap.

And when we reach the “even this wet puddle would be nice for a nap” level of tiredness, we head back to the apartment to go to bed. On the train back, I saw a note from Mizuho bank stating their ATMs are closed this weekend. Closed ATMs are never a thing I have encountered here, but I have heard rumors of it. Why do the ATMs need to close? Will the robots remember how kind Japan was to them when it is time for the uprising? Is Japan just very careful not to karoshi its ATMs? It will forever be a mystery to me (or maybe not, if I could read more kanji).

The rest of this trip will be planned around the least rainy of the rainy season days, with a trip to Nikko and Fuji Five Lakes on the two sunny-ish days I have in my time here. I haven’t done some of the day trips despite living in Tokyo for a year – Hakone is also on my list! Anything beyond that is planned poorly at best as this was a last-minute trip!

Thursday was the day we were morning sloth creatures, up incredibly late the night before because of Disney and transit times. We didn’t roll out of our ABB until almost noon, sluggishly blinking in the cold sunshine as people walking tiny dogs and traffic swirled around us. We had a  4pm entrance ticket to the Ghibli museum, so we stayed in and around Shinjuku for the afternoon.

First on our agenda: swords. We rolled down the street to the Japanese sword museum since it was close to us. If you know things about swords, it is probably much more enjoyable. I liked seeing the shiny, polished blades made by master smiths and they had a few exhibits on how the styles of swords had changed over the years. Of course, no pictures allowed 🙁

From there, we detoured to the Shinjuku gardens. I hadn’t gone in as a student because it cost money (like two bucks). The Shinjuku gardens are an immaculate, expansive, and extensively landscaped refuge from the wild urban bustle of Shinjuku. They were worth the 200 yen and the fight with the ticket-dispensing machine that several other people struggled with to get in.

You could easily spend an entire day in Shinjuku garden…we only had an hour before we had to head to Mitaka and the Ghibli Museum, so we went straight to the Japanese gardens.

It was the Ghibli time. The museum is whimsical, with a multicolored exterior and a garden on top. The interior is a mish-mosh of charming doors, spiral staircases, fancy staircases, and stained glass. If I had infinite money, maybe I would make a house like this!

The exhibits show you how a film goes from an idea and a concept to real life at Studio Ghibli, with a lot of hands-on exhibits that you can explore to make the film move in front of you. One room is covered in watercolor concept art from Ghibli films. Another is a dark room with huge zoetropes moving in strobe lights: cat bus flew over bouncing Totoros, and birds swirled in a chamber. It was pretty incredible even though we had to fight a small sea of tourists.

You can also watch a short film – ours was about a special kid who sold big radishes in exchange for a star, and his plight to raise the star despite being chased by people who wanted to take him away. I wish Ghibli would release their short films 🙁

We gave Ghibli all our money to close out the day and shuffled back home on the train.

Friday, we went to Kimono Studio WA for our 10 AM photoshoot. This studio was a balance of affordable, flexible, and offered the most gorgeous kimono we could find. We were greeted by two energetic and enthusiastic ladies, Hisami and Maho. They have been running the studio for over two years and happily take many foreigners through the kimono wearing process, followed by a photoshoot with props and tips on how to pose.

They cheerily did our hair and makeup while our male companions waited patiently and quietly in a corner.  The ladies had many handmade hairpins and accessories to choose from – they had made and designed them all themselves. It was hard to choose!

Because the kimono’s left side is crossed on top, the left side is generally emphasized, so we chose two hairpieces, one big one for the left, and a small one on the right. Makeup is more vibrant too in order to counterbalance the vibrant patterns and rich colors of the kimono.

Hair and makeup done, they quickly dressed the men. They surprisingly had tabi socks that fit (!) their giant American feet. It took ten seconds of folding and wrapping and stepping for the guys to be ready in their outfits.

As a lady, wearing a kimono requires, of course, many layers. The kimono in the studio were princess style, not made for walking around in much since princesses generally sat around and were beautiful as their full-time employment. Rough life.

Kimono are crossed left over right. Right over left is reserved for corpses – so if you see a cosplayer with the sides crossed backwards, they are actually dead. The cord on the obi are tied on top if the occasion is happy, and on the bottom if the occasion is somber.

First, the under-kimono layer:

The patterns were simple, but still elegant, and the obi were able to really shine.

Then, it was time for the expensive layer. A good kimono in Japan can cost up to $100,000, hand-stitched and designed and full of rich silks and fabrics.

We picked out a few prints and got the pictures burned to a disc so we could get more prints later. It was a great way to both become a princess for a few hours and learn more about the traditional way of wearing a kimono and its cultural significance. If you’re in the area, I definitely recommend visiting Kimono Studio WA. They made sure our experience was special and a fantastic way to spend a morning!

My shameless plug for kimono studios aside, we walked to Ebisu garden center afterward since it was nearby. There, we found….another European Christmas Village. It was a gathering of fancy buildings with cool architecture, so maybe the Christmas village was warranted. There was also a French restaurant which was about $200/plate for dinner. Fancy.

We made a brief stop at the bookoff in Shibuya to purchase all the cheap used books! If you see pictures of Tokyo crossings, it is generally Shibuya’s iconic Hachiko crossing. Shibuya is filled with funky architecture, fancy fashion, and shopping.

Last on our list, Odaiba and the giant, life-sized Gundam. The Gundam is going to be torn down in March, so we got in while the gettin’ was good. The Gundam is complete with a cafe selling merchandise at its base, as is the way of Japan.

Odaiba is home to shopping (in Diver City, which yes, is “Diversity”), weird new buildings, Rainbow Bridge, and a statue of liberty. Apparently it was a part of a Japan-France exhibit in 1999, but residents loved it so much it became a permanent installation.

We ended the night by leaning against a thing. Only one more full day in Tokyo to go 🙁

Before we dive into our further Tokyo activites, we need to straighten out the butchering of the pronunciation of Harajuku as Gwent Stefani has unfortunately popularized it.

It’s not hair-uh-juku, it’s harr-ah-juku. You would think that after all these years she would get this one thing right since she loves it dearly, but alas, she does not. And now that I know your inner monologues have all been corrected, we will carry on.

Tuesday, we explored Harajuku and Yoyogi, which were some of my favorite places when I lived here. Harajuku is a bustling neighborhood filled with funky fashion, cheap deals, street food, and crepes. Yoyogi is, by contrast, a peaceful oasis in the middle of big city chaos.

Since we arrived early-ish, Harajuku’s Takeshita street was not yet awake, so we went for a wander around Yoyogi park. The birds had necks here and didn’t look prone to attacking. The leaves were changing and had transformed areas of the park into yellow carpeting. It was empty this early in the morning except for the elderly, clean-up crews, and a few groups of synchronized dancing college students. If it weren’t for the sound of traffic and the occasional skyscraper poking its head above the treeline, you could easily forget you were in a big city.

After lunch, we went to the Ukiyoe museum in Harajuku, the Ota museum of art, which is home to a small collection of prints from the late 1800s. These prints were much more stylistic and advanced than the theater ukiyoe we had seen in Osaka. They had a large exhibit on Mizuno Toshikata’s works, some of which mixed ladies in Western and traditional Japanese wear. We could not take pictures inside, but I have used my powers of google to show you one below:

We decided to sync up our post-lunch food comas with sleepy cats in a cat cafe we saw from the street after lunch. Cat Cafes became a thing in Japan after I had left in college, and the only other time we had been was in Korea. Cats abound at the cat cafe, mired in sunbeams and punching boxes over like the tiny little terrors they are.

Now that it was post-lunch and post-cat nap, many of the shops on Takeshita street were hoppin’. It’s a long street filled with strange, kitsch shops selling everything from souvenirs to ugly cat shirts to lolita fashion. In the evenings and at weekends, it is jam-packed with tourists and locals, shoulder to shoulder, shuffling past merchants hawking wares and proclaiming sales loudly and strange Jamaican bouncers.

It was a weekday and only mildly crowded, thankfully. We of course went to Daiso, the giant 100 yen shop, and filled our bags with souvenirs and food.

But lo, there was a photo booth (purikura) shop across the street from Daiso. I have never done this thing before, as it was not something I spent my money on as a student. We entered a horrifically pink stairway tunnel and were greeted by over twenty photo booths. The photo booths were plastered in airbrushed women making the same kissy face and copious amounts of filtered makeup. It was snapchat filters before snapchat was a thing.

Of course we did this thing. We fed the machines our coins eagerly and decorated the heck out of our beautiful faces. Most of the booths used green screens and I forgot to take off my very green sweater for the barbie photobooth. Here are a few gems, including some misspellings of Buddha because I couldn’t figure out where the undo button was once I had made a mistake, so we had to roll with it for the rest of the sessions.

Our last act in Harajuku was to consume delicious Angel Crepes for the evening, which is the greatest creperie in Tokyo.

Oh, and we did find this thing:

We were going to ascend the Sky Tree, but its expensiveness extends to ludicrous levels and we were laden with bags from Daiso, land of the tasty and cheap souvenirs. I had the purikura photos to download, so we opted to head back to Shinjuku for the evening instead.

Wednesday was our day for East-ish Tokyo things, like Asakusa, the Imperial Palace, and DisneySea. We started at the Palace gardens in the morning. You can’t go into the palace without an appointment, which is elaborate to get and involves filling out forms as is the Japanese way. We did not have an appointment, and instead walked around the beautifully groomed exterior gardens.

After a lovely lunch with a view of Tokyo station, we headed to Asakusa and Sensoji for souvenir-purchasing and shrine-visiting.

Asakusa is the place I usually use to purchase Japanese-y souvenirs. They’re cheap and numerous and have an exceeding variety on the street in front of the shrine itself. It’s a popular destination and is always packed.

From Asakusa, we struck out for Disney, Japanesey souvenirs in tow. We planned to stash all of our things in the station and enjoy DisneySea for a few hours with the After 6 pass.

It was totally worth it. DisneySea is the most beautiful Disney I have ever been to (disclaimer: this has been two Disneylands). The themes were lovely, and we got to see the Christmas show and fireworks. Plus, a cold breeze was blowing in off the ocean so most people left after the fireworks. We assume they were freezing and died, but our strong midwestern bodies prevailed and we enjoyed the park the full four hours we had. We even got on some of the bigger rides with little or no wait!

We returned to Shinjuku very late, leaving the park after its official closing time. A drunk man coughed on me in Shinjuku station and now I swear I am getting sick. Only time will tell if I will finish strong or succumb to germs!