Shibuya, and other stories.

We woke up early after a semi crappy night of sleep and had a plan to go to Akihabara…eventually.

This is the selection of tea-based drinks in the grocery store. Jealous.

Nik and I both eating random skewers of meat from the grocery store.

This is a delicious little package of amazingness. It’s rice and seaweed and a little bit of something else like a pickled vegetable in the middle. But the secret is that the rice is better than the rice at half the sushi restaurants in Vancouver, and this here is bought in the grocery store and corner stores around the city. Doing it right.

We got out at Shibuya station to wander for a bit. It was super early and our choice for lunch hadn’t opened, and the place to exchange our train coupon for a train pass hadn’t opened so we walked around Shibuya for a few hours. A cool place – big streets with big stores, mixed with little streets and little stores just off the beaten path.

The famous Shibuya scramble crossing. Everyone walks every which way when it goes green for pedestrians.

As we walked back we saw a tower we wanted to go to the top of. A little bit of escalators and walking past hotel conceirges later and we were at this fine view. The city just keeps going in all directions.

The train stations are pretty neat, and there are lots of them.

This is the lineup for lunch. The sign says that the wait is a half hour from where Nik is standing, and it extends in both directions.

A little alley of ramen shops in the Tokyo station. (not the city Tokyo, but the station Tokyo. Think “New Westminster station”, even though Columbia is also in New West :)).

Lunch was delicious. It was a bowl of noodles and a bowl of a thicker broth. You picked up the noodles and dipped them in the broth and slurped them up, which is why the paper bibs were necessary. At the end, they take your bowl of broth and add fish stock to make it an actual soup, so you can finish it up. This was a great meal, and totally worth the ~45 minute wait for it. Sean went somewhere with no line for lunch, and ended up wandering the station looking at things while we ate. There is a ton of stuff in these stations, they are like malls (not even “mini malls”, just malls in their own regard)

We trained around the center loop for 20-30 minutes and got off in Akihibara, which is known to be a place for electronics. We went into a 5 storey arcade that had people playing arcade games with physical cards they put on a tray that the machine could read. They played the card, then tapped the screen to make choices with the card they’d played. A super cool mix of physical and virtual!

We went into Yodibashi, which is a HUGE retail department store. 7 storeys, each floor with as much space as a Toys R Us with electric stuff. We went to the camera section, because Sean was in the market for a new camera, Nik was thinking of buying a lens and so was I. I ended up getting a phenomenal deal on a Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 II. Afer
Not only was the listed price about $100 cheaper than an online retailer in Vancouver (which is cheaper than a local store 🙁 ), but they also take the tax off because I’m a foreigner so I save an additional 10% there (list price includes tax!) and then they take another 8% off if you pay by Visa. Ridiculous.

Then Sean took us to a maid cafe. It’s not a sex thing, it’s this nerd cultural thing. Look it up, I can’t explain it in writing. I wdasn’t allowed to take photos of the girls serving, but here’s some deserts from the restaurant. Everything is so cute!