Today was planned to be an easy day. Easy is a relative term. :) We could have slept in, but everyone was moving pretty early, maybe 6:30? I think I slept better than the previous night because we turned on some white noise and remember to close the shades, but it still wasn't great. That's pretty much the story of all the sleep...I got a sufficient amount, 5-6 hours, but it may have been interrupted and I probably woke up early.
Anyway. Ben had a plan! We would train over to the Nintendo store, which was close to a Pokemon store and a Minecraft pop-up. We'd also stop by Don Quijote, an everything store, eat pork katsu for lunch (yum!) and finally go to a famous street for crepes. Sounds good!
Before we checked out I took some pictures of the room. Children older than 6yrs old aren't allowed to sleep in the same bed as anyone else, which was a bit of a shock to us when Ben was booking hotels. It also meant that all the room arrangements were interesting and unique.
This hotel had bunk beds. It was also apartment like, so there was a big table, seating, and a mini-kitchen.
This was the day it also decided to rain all day. It wasn't a hard rain, but it was consistent. Luckily, the hotel had umbrellas that we could borrow. It was actually rather interesting seeing all the umbrellas out and about. Everyone had one, and 90% were the same style and 85% were the same type too - a clear umbrella. All the stores had umbrella baggers. In some of the other places we went there were umbrella lockers, which was just a grid of circles with locks that you could place your umbrella handle in.
Ok, the first place we visited was the Nintendo store, mostly because they opened first. We (and by we I mean Ben) navigated the trains to the right stop and we got off at a pretty large station. We started heading to our destination, only to realize that we were in the middle of an iconic location, Shibuya Crossing. This is the crossing where all the people walk at once and you can walk diagonally too. It is estimated to be the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world. When we were there it was definitely busy, but it didn't stand out as crazy busy compared to the locations we were just at. Everyone crossed, no one hit anyone else, and we were again on our way. The photo is from Travis, who was there later in the week.
Nintendo was on the sixth floor, but there was a cute little outside escalator to use and get up to them. The guys had all recently played Zelda so we got several Zelda items, along with some little side plates from Mario.
Even more surprising was that the Minecraft pop-up store was right next to these stores too! It was nice not to have to walk too far between them, and it let us look at all the stores before making a final decision.
It was lunch time and we were all hungry after waking up early, so we went to the pork katsu place. It was delicious. I had pork katsu a few other times while there, but this one was by far the best. Everyone enjoyed their meal, including Joshua. It was pretty funny though, because he kept calling it 'chicken'. "Can you cut up my chicken?" "I'll have a little more chicken." "This chicken is pretty good!" To be fair though, it is somewhat like chicken nuggets. I think I'm going to have to try and make this at home, because it's just delicious.
After our hunger was sated once again, we moved on to Don Quijote. This is described as a discount megastore. There were seven stories. We walked around floor one and picked up a few things. Then we spent quite a bit of time on floor two, groceries. The idea of bringing food home is appealing because it won't just sit and get dust. (Not that it is bad to get other items too, but useful items have a strong appeal to me now.)
The last stop of...this part of the day...was Takeshita Street. Known for it's desserts, it also had a lot of shopping too. We started with crepes. Hindsight being 20/20, we would probably not get these again. Well, we would not get one with ice cream in the rain. Ok, I'll back up. We got two. An apple cinnamon one and a chocolate strawberry cheesecake gelato one. The apple one was pretty good, although you had to eat a fair amount of crepe plain before getting to the toppings. The ice cream one did not have the toppings well distributed, started to melt, and was generally hard to eat, especially while holding an umbrella and standing up. We still enjoyed it, but would make different choices if we're ever back there.
Right across the street were the other two stores we wanted to go to. The first was a ¥100 store. It was pretty much like a dollar store, but there were some manual fans that Joshua had talked about earlier. So he grabbed one of those. Then we went to the capsule store right next door. We have capsule machines in the US, but it's usually just 20 machines in a grocery store. I tried to find a number, but I would guess that there were at least 2000 machines. Joshua loved these. Isaac picked out several too but didn't open them until we got home...he got a cool light up jellyfish and a grey cat and a slug with curry on it.
We made our way back to the hotel, picked up our luggage, and took a taxi over to our next hotel. It was near Disney (next day) and was significantly cheaper than the other hotels because it was kind of out-of-the-way from the rest of Tokyo.
Let me tell you how surprised we were when we saw our room. We were not expecting four twin beds. It was still hazy from the rain, but had a nice view.
We relaxed for just a bit and Cheryl showed up as she was going to join us for Disney the next day! We all ate dinner together in our room and went to bed. Right after we had gotten into the room I had arranged suitcases and unpacked just a little bit. (I couldn't handle the chaos of the last hotel again.) Ben had stuff in some other suitcases, so I took it out and put it in the bathroom. We then had a funny conversation:
B: where's my toiletries bag?
A: in the bathroom
B: where's the something else?
A: in the bathroom
B: where's my toothbrush?
A: in the bathroom
B: I can't find it.
A: um.. *GASP* I threw it out.
B: why would you do that?
A: so that your replacement was already in the bathroom.
In seriousness though, my sleep-fogged brain had a reason. When packing up, Ben's toiletry bag was already packed. (I may have been the one that packed it.) There was still a toothbrush by the sink. Isaac had originally had an extra toothbrush in his bag, so I figured he had taken it out for some reason. I threw it away because I didn't have a good spot for it as things were almost packed and it was extra. Obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment