Our first official day in Tokyo certainly started off a lot better than the previous day had begun. We woke up relatively early and since it was a Saturday, we headed off almost immediately to Harajuku to try and spot the clusters of people that lurk around on the train bridge in cosplay and lolita clothes. Of course, we were easily distracted by Takeshita-dori first, and wandered up and down as the shops began to open and the crowd began to grow. It was pretty busy by the time we had finished having crepes for breakfast (I passed on those since the thought of thickened cream that early in the morning was making me feel ill) and since everything was pretty much open by then, we decided to go shopping!




Sally & Nat eating crepes and iced coffee for breakfast in Takeshita-dori in Harajuku.

Unfortunately, shopping didn’t quite turn out as well as I had hoped. After visiting shops like Closet Child, Body Line, Mari’s Rock, Richards and other similar places, I sadly discovered that I am slightly too large for Japanese clothing… and so began the depressing stage of my trip where I followed Nat and Sally around various stores and held their stuff while they shopped. Of course, it wasn’t too bad that first day in Harajuku as we were so excited to be where we were.




Sally & Nat: All burnt out after shopping…




Crowds from a bridge at the bottom end of Harajuku.

Around 2pm, we’d given up on spotting any cosplayers and began to head back to our hotel to dump our purchases off. Of course, it was only once back at our hotel that we realised we should have gotten off at Yoyogi station instead of Harajuku to find the cosplayers, but we were too late to go back. Instead, we lounged around there for a little before deciding to brave Shibuya for a late lunch and an early dinner.

Words cannot describe to you how much I loved that place.

Stepping out of the train station without the panic and anxiety we’d felt there the previous day allowed me to see it for what it really is. Busy, flashy and noisy most definitely… but there was something about the whole atmosphere of the place that had me hooked within minutes of being there. As hungry as we were by that point since we had skipped lunch (and breakfast in my case), we couldn’t help but just wander for ages, soaking up the lights and the buses driving around blasting the latest releases from Nightmare, KAT-TUN and a couple of other unknown bands.




Second impression of Shibuya.




Streets all lit up for Christmas.




The KAT-TUN bus, mainly taken for Rachel.

Hunger of course took over, though it took us forever to find food! Somewhere along the line, Sally and I had both forgotten that we had read/seen things about restaurants being hidden at the top of department stores instead of the bottom like they are here, and it took us over an hour to catch onto that fact again. We managed to stumble across a dining building in the trio of PARCO buildings in Shibuya and hit up this random place that promised us an English menu. The food was absolutely delicious, even though we weren’t sure at the time what exactly we were eating… but that was half the fun of it!




Dinner… Or what was left of it!

After dinner, we went back out to do some more exploring of Shibuya. We went to Tower Records to browse around, though we didn’t buy anything just yet, figuring we’d save the shopping for when we came back to Tokyo in a week.




Jpop section of Tower Records, again for Rachel.




Blurry night photo of Shibuya.




No, we weren’t the only idiots standing around taking photos of this ad campaign.

It actually worked too, I bought that album despite not liking L'arc~en~Ciel.

Instead, we just hung around and fawned over all the CDs before heading back to the hotel to chill out, after hitting the convenience store again, of course. We amused ourselves by dressing in the yukata that the hotel provided, before somehow talking for something like four to six hours after initially going to bed.




Necessary convenience store purchases: BOSS coffee and chocolate.




Sally with Nat in yukata.




Surprisingly nicer than it looks/sounds.

We eventually crashed at midnight, figuring it was best to sleep or suffer the next day when we had to shuttle ourselves to Kyoto.