Thursday

This was our first FULL day together and we were busy busy. This was our first trip on the Metro and our ride started in Shinjuku which claims to be the busiest Metro station..IN THE WORLD!!! We wound up there about 9am and it was a big psycho to say the least. 2 million people pass through it everyday!!! Visions of blurred people just running by, blurred because it was a nonstop see of business suits. We made our way to Asakusa where we saw a temple
and a pagoda

and a cute little shopping stripHeres the entance to those places:







They were all really pretty, but we didn’t spend much time there because we felt it was a little to touristy for our tastes. So we wondered around to some back streets and into some neighborhoods which was amazing. On our way, we saw a smaller temple where there was a young couple that seemed like they were taking engagement pictures in their kimonos
There were houses with little bitty doorways, potted plants everywhere, little local shops selling everything from cloths to fish bait and tons of adorable restaurants and best of all; we were by far the only ones around that weren’t locals. It reminded me of old Japan. I feel in love with a little barber shop so took a picture. A little old lady walked by us and I think was laughing at me! I guess its not everyday someone takes a picture of the local barber shop...


From here we wondered our way to Akihabara where we went to Electronics City. This was of course, heaven for Michael, we wondered through some tiny hall ways to see TONS of capacitors, transistors, resistors, connectors, switches, cables… everything. It was an incredible site.

Then we walked the streets here that were filled with all sorts of new electronics from phones to cameras to video games. There were soooo many games for all the game systems, it makes best buy look like a teeny tiney little store that doesn't sell much of anything.

Elevators

Inside those elevators

The Game scene here is very interesting. Especially for the two of us who grew up playing video games!! No matter the age of people here they all seem to be playing them. We went into what I would describe as an arcade which was 5 stories tall and we wondered our way up to the top, they had every new and old school game you could imagine being played. The pink building is the arcade we went in. We also popped into a Slots/Pachinko building which was very similar to the arcades, but they were playing for money and it was again 5 stories tall. The slots and pachinko machines were all cartoony not what you would expect to see. Both had the crazy loud music that you see in the movies (If you haven’t seen Lost in Translation, I would recommend it. I loved the movie, but can’t wait to see it again after being here. It paints a very vivid precise picture of what Tokyo is, at least in my opinion.) Throughout the day we saw tons of the young teenage crowd walking around in their new style of clothing. Michael and I refer to it as Harajuku clothes, but I can’t even describe it. Girls wearing cloths that look like little bo peep, but in a French maid style, others with big black shoes and knee high socks that are striped black and pink. I’ll have to get some pictures of them. You also see a lot of people in their school uniforms. We got stuck in rain for the last hour of our trip so after all that we had killed about 7 hours and our feet, so we came back with the intention of going somewhere else later, but just went to eat and came back and relaxed. By the end of the day we decided that Tokyo is like a big cartoon that came to life.


Today it is still really rainy but we are about to go brave the weather...so here we go!!