day 51! takadanobaba, ikebukuro, nakameguro, shibuya

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So I was gonna keep my haircut a "secret" til I got home, but I'm realizing how hard that's gonna be, since it would mean not posting any pics of me, ever haha. :p Also since you are so eager to see, Janet. Here are pics:

I GOT BANGSSSSSS. So. Posting a purikura first because as we all know they are the most flattering and I am self-conscious. Also, I really liked how this pic turned out!

Also a less flattering pic of normal me. :) It's a very blunt haircut.

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We got up early the next day, and decided to go get lunch at this place we'd seen a few times while walking to the station. It was kind of confusing, the place was a big building, that said there was ice skating, bowling, and parking. But then there was a big sign in a window saying "lunch!", and the whole place was called Citizen's Plaza. Very curious. Anyway we went to check it out.


Turns out we barely made it to the tail end of lunch, but they let us check out the food (it's buffet style) and it looked fine to us so we said sure.

They had miso soup, rice and curry....

and many other random small dishes, most of which SEEMED to be pickled. O_o

Anyway there was plenty of stuff, and it's kind of nice to be able to try a little of everything. :)

The obaa-san running the floor was pretty nice too, although she kept trying to get Kurt to eat white-people foods lol. Like she handed him a mini bowl of pasta. And then forced him to take some bread (that was coated in sugar). O_o

They had these little cakes of like bean paste for dessert, I liked those a lot. :) It was a pretty good lunch, I'm curious to see how it is when it's busier and they probably have more varieties of things.

After lunch we went to Ikebukuro, which is another big station on the Yamanote Line (the line that is in the center of Tokyo). Kurt did have to do work at some point, but we looked around some shops real quick.

This was an all Hello Kitty store.

Gloomy bear tshirts!

An arcade with a GIANT rilakkuma!

This little girl was playing a Kinect arcade dancing game, where you copy the dance moves of the character on screen. The moves are super Japanese-y though so I'm guessing this game was for Asia only.

The drinks were quite cute, but expensive. This is just their fake foods window display, but you can see how elaborate some of the desserts get.

We found a second floor cafe with a pretty nice view, so we walked through the first floor entrance, to be seated. They asked "smoking or non-smoking?" and then brought us to a table on the first floor. I was like "can we get seats on the second floor...?", the guy looked at me for a sec, then brought me outside and showed me the staircase and smiled sheepishly and was like "there's the second floor...." It was an entirely different store, it just kind of looked from the outside that they were the same because the 1st floor is a cafe, and we saw people drinking coffee on the second floor. Oops! I felt silly.

The upstairs was a very girl-oriented cafe. Everything had stars and whipped cream, and it was almost all girls in there.

I got a coffee drink, and Kurt had a very tiny tart/cake. Well he ate some of it, pronounced it "too sweet", and then ignored it for the next two hours while I whittled away at it.

A people watching video clip! From our 2nd floor viewpoint. 



We stayed there working/reading for a couple of hours, and then we went to Sunshine City, a big mall/collection of stores in Ikebukuro. As luck would have it, they were having a fashion show that day!! Well, not high fashion, but a fashion show for stores in the mall. It's kind of nice cuz it's relatively cheap for them to produce, but is a bit of publicity for them, as well as a marketing for their tenants (the stores).


It didn't start just yet so we looked around briefly and I bought *gasp* yet ANOTHER pair of shoes. This one was actually out of necessity though, I bought a pair of boots since I'd thrown my old pair away, and had been wearing nothing but sandals and wedges since, and my poor feet were getting trashed from all the walking and hiking I'd been doing in them.

Fashion show! I took a *lot* of pics, and most of them look shitty cuz I couldn't get that close, and the models kept moving too fast, but I will only post a few here.

The little girl was cute! I'm pretty sure all of the models were just volunteers, with no modeling background. Still all of them performed admirably and seemed to enjoy the limelight. No tripping and falling. :) Japanese people are the masters of heels.

And seriously the kids were really talented. They just seemed the most natural and not-affected.

Oh and there was one store with swimsuits and all I have to say is DAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

aaaaaaaaaaannnngggggg. O_O You're welcome for the butt shot.

Then some random people in tropical outfits came out to talk about something, Okinawa something or other. I was remarking to Kurt how they all seemed to have really great stage presence.

Ok and this little girl looked a LOT like what my sister looked like when she was a kid. :o Uncanny.

And then there was a set of little girls that were way too young to be wearing what they were wearing. T_T

Then the three girls from before came out and revealed to us that they were actually a girl band!

They had a surprise mini-concert for us, with two songs + dancing. One of the girls was just a voice though, she didn't participate in the dancing and sat in a chair the whole time. Kurt and I wondered what was wrong with that one.

Then the fashion show continued. We stayed a while, but left eventually cuz it didn't seem to be ending at all. We watched maybe 1 hour of it I'm guessing?

They have a cute Ghibli store in the mall as well.

Cute!! flower pot white Totoros.

We had dinner plans to meet up with Kurt's friend/old coworker, from when he spent a while working in Japan for Microsoft. We met him in Nakameguro, one of the stops on my old route to school. To get there, we took the line that I used to take. :') It was very very sentimental. I can't explain it but, public transportation is such a staple of every day life here in Japan, so to see my old line, and hear them announce all the old stations I used to hear every day, it just brought me back more than, well, almost anything here.

Kurt's friend's name is David, and he was a tall skinny white dude that vaguely resembles Kurt, and went to CMU. He's been living in Japan almost 10 years now. :o He brought us to a Mexican restaurant which is pretty hard to come by, in Japan. Actually in Asia in general. It's called Junkadelic.

The interior deco was very eccentric. Apparently it's a very well known and popular restaurants, particularly among foreigners (who miss Mexican food), this restaurant being one of the only decent authentic options.

Actually it was pretty funny, while waiting for David, I didn't know what he looked like so every time I saw a white person I'd be like "is it that guy??" It wasn't, but the funny thing is that literally EVERY single one of those white people, later on throughout the course of our dinner, ended up showing up at that restaurant. That's how well-known it is I guess. :)

Frozen margaritas! Kurt got a tamarind one, and I got ...oh man, I forgot the name. :( Some strange fruit I hadn't heard of before though. They were good!

The rest of dinner was alright. The food was AMAZING. I mean, it was expensive for what it was, but not overly so. And I've been craving Mexican food for a while which made it that much better. It's not exactly like food we'd get at home, it has maybe a bit of a Japanese accent to it, but that just made it yummier. :o

David was really quiet at first which made me sorta anxious cuz there was nothing to say. But he seemed to open more and relax as dinner went on (and we had drinks...). Turns out I do like him (I was meh at first), he's just a bit of a quirky introvert I guess. :)

Taiga had called me right before dinner to ask if I wanted to hang out. I said that we had dinner plans but could meet him afterwards (he lived closeby). We finished dinner around 10 and then made plans to play pool in Shibuya, and David said he'd tag along.

Requirement of one drink per person, so I got a yuzu umeshuu. Yuzu is a citrus fruit here, kind of a cross between an orange and a lemon. I've never actually seen one sold to be eaten, but it's a relatively common flavor. It was really good. :) I wonder if they sell it at Marukai!

We played a couple of games of 9 ball, and then a 2v2 game of 8 ball. Then it was time for David to catch his train so we headed out.

I really wanted to take purikura, so we went to a purikura studio -- a building with JUST purikura. Here is Taiga and me decorating our pics~

I really liked how this on turned out :D

The little speech bubbles around Kurt are SO COOL. I thought it was such a sharp idea. Basically you can choose an icon (I chose speech bubbles), and then you "stamp" it onto the picture, and it basically copies the area that you stamped and pastes it into the icon. Then when you stamp again, it actually stamps the whole thing onto your picture. Cute idea!!! So cute.

This one turned out really nice too. :) There's options at the end of the process, to send a few photos to your cell phone. Kurt and I hadn't been able to do it so far since neither of us have Japanese cell phones capable of receiving data on us. But since Taiga was here, we got these two. :D Yay!

You can also visit their website to retrieve the rest of the pics, but to do that you have to pay extra. Actually it's usually ~$3/month, and then they let you access the digital files of all your purikura.

Yay I heart purikura. After taking those though, it was time to go home. It was really nice to see Taiga again, and I thought it was very sweet of him to actually contact me and try to hang out. :) I gave everyone my info and told everyone I'd be free most of the time but so far, haven't heard from anyone (which I rather expected) so it was a pleasant surprise to see him. ^^