day 47! takadanobaba, shinjuku

So for those of you who haven't heard already, Kurt and I decided to make a short trip to Kyoto, to do some sightseeing of course, but also (mainly?) to visit Kurt's host mom. Not for too long, only 2 days and 1 night. Also we looked up travel options, like the bullet train, but it was tooooo expensive. $260 round trip. :( So Kurt was nice enough to agree to travel on an overnight bus, where you leave Tokyo at night, and wake up in Kyoto in the morning. The only time I'd visited Kyoto before this, with my sis when she came to visit me in Tokyo during my study abroad, we went for the same option. :) It only ended up being $80 round trip!


Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself.


Today, probably due to us being exhausted even thinking about the night bus ride to come, we didn't do much during the day. 

Here I am, somewhat preparing for the trip. Oh and you can see the room! It extends further back than the vantage point shown here, so it's not as small as it looks. :) Small TV, balcony, and the stove/bathroom are behind the camera.

Most of the mess is, unfortunately, mine. :(

Also, I love Japanese comforters!! They are so plump and squishy.

We finally dragged ourselves away from the comfort of the room, but only on account of us not wanting to waste a whole day here. Also food.

We went to a soba place near the station cuz Kurt felt like soba. This soba restaurant was definitely of the fast food variety, not as in they have hamburger and fries soba, but as in it's meant for quick consumption. :) Its really cute, all the seats are along counters cuz usually you go in alone, or maybe just with one other person, so there's no real need to have tables with people facing each other.

(p.s. I'm a fan of eating this way cuz no one can see me drop utensils, choke on food, or whiplash all over my clothes. :( )

Also most of the patrons of this restaurant are guys (businessmen) since I dunno, it's just a functional store with functional food, and it's not very cute or glamorous so it doesn't really attract girls. Which is dumb cuz soba is delicious and it's cheap!

Kurt got zarusoba, which is cold soba (it doesn't mean cold soba, but it is noodles that are served cold). The black cup to the side is filled with this light dipping sauce made of light soy sauce, mirin, and dashi. It's more of a soup than a sauce I guess. And then you add the green onions that are sitting on the lid, and usually a bit of wasabi. Then you pick up some noodles, dump them into the little cup, and eat the noodles. :) It's super refreshing, it's like Japanese liang mian I guess. Also really healthy.

Oh and like ramen, you're supposed to slurp when you eat the noodles. It's supposed to make the noodles taste better (?) which I never really understood. But yea just do it. :x

Oh and when you're done eating the noodles, you can take that red teapot/pourer thing, which is filled with hmmm hot soba water (I THINK it's like the soup/water that results from cooking the soba noodles?) pour a bit into whatever remains of your dipping sauce, and drink it. It's really good. :)

I got kitsune soba, which is one kind of "hot soba" (although kitsune means fox, not sure why it's called that). It basically has the same ingredients as cold soba, but it's like the hot water soup stuff has already been added in, so the whole thing is hot when you eat it. The food experience is not unlike ramen :) but it is not oily at all. That big sheet of brown thing is tofu hehe, and those little rice krispies are like, well, kinda like rice krispies.

After our quick dinner, we walked around towards the Waseda side of the station. Kurt introduced me to the joys of Choco Cro, a bakery/cafe chain. :o

Chocolate croissant...it may not look like much but it is so delicious. :o

It's rich and buttery enough that staring at it was enough to make me fat, so Kurt had to tank it for the team. :x

Then we went into Taito station (the arcade chain)...

Where we took our first purikura! Purikura are hella fun but also nerve wracking. They throw a bunch of different options at you, give you 5 seconds to decide & answer as a group, and of course it's all in Japanese so the 3 seconds of gaping while you translate what it's asking you is precious time lost. :(

It also barely gives you time between pics to prepare or decide how you want to arrange yourselves. And then the rakugaki portion (the decoration part, where you get to draw on your pics), you only get like 1.5 minutes!! O_O Fortunately if there's no one waiting to use the machine after you, they often give you bonus time, but still. NERVE WRACKING!

As you can see from the picture though, the inside of the booth is suuuuper well lit, which eliminates any unflattering shadows and completely bleaches out your face/skin. They also do some other image transforming witchcraftery and everyone, I swear, EVERYONE just looks amazing in purikura!!!! XD I love it so much. It is a godsend for us unphotogenic folks. :*)

This is a pic of the rakugaki portion of the process. After you go into the booth and take pictures, it directs you to the side of the machine, where you can go through the photos you just took and decorate them. There are a TON of options for what you can do, and they vary by machine. They have little clipart that you can stamp onto the image, you can write on the image with pen, you can add the date to it, change the background, give yourself sunglasses....it's insane. O_O I personally think it's the most fun part. :) After you're done, there are a few more options like what format you want the pictures printed in, and then they get printed and you're done!

I don't have the original prints of course, so I took the ghetto route and took pictures of the pictures with my camera. XD lol. ain't technology sumthin'.

What was really hilarious is that, you know how I mentioned the photoshop witchcraftery? Well I wasn't joking. They do apply some amount of filtering and automated touch up to the pictures. It's hard to see in the photo, maybe, but Kurt's eyes have been transformed into anime eyes in these pics. XD lol! Seriously, they're all glittery and round and sparkly. :D

Mine remain unchanged. :( Magic only goes so far.

After walking around the department store a bit more, we headed home to finish packing and get going. The entire trip wasn't for very long so it didn't take much to get ready. We packed all our stuff in our backpacks and headed off for Shinjuku station, where the bus awaited....

Can't make a trip without delicious konbini food snacks. :3

The bus company we used (that Kurt found and handled all the ticket buying stuff for) was called Willer Express. We were able to make it to check in on time, actually with an hour or so to kill. But finally 10:30 arrived and we headed for our bus...

The interior of the bus was pretty decent. It's just your average charter bus. Very clean, of course, because after all this is a Japanese bus we're talking about. :p They kept the bus really warm inside, I guess since they were expecting people to sleep the whole way over. There were curtains/shades on the window. and actually a big shade that went behind the bus driver, so that no light from the street came in. It was like a warm little coffin.

We are tired already. Only 8 hours to go before we reach Kyoto....