day 52! shimokitazawa, odaiba

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Omg I've been falling so far behind with this thing. Sorry, it's just that they take so damn long, and while they're enjoyable to write while I'm in the process of writing them, before I actually get STARTED it feels like that essay that you put off doing all semester.


But thank you for all of those who have taken the time to read or check out my travel blog. :) I have to admit that the fact that people (or person) are reading this is the only thing that has kept me motivated to keep going -- and I know I will be really glad of it some day. So thank you! And I will try to do more weird things to keep you entertained.
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So today was Kurt's last full day in Japan, and I told him that the day was his and I would basically go wherever he felt like going and we could eat what he wanted to eat, etc. We had talked about going to a little part of Tokyo called Shimokitazawa, that apparently has interesting eclectic little shops, and that I had never been to before. Since we hadn't managed to go there yet, we decided to start there.

The station is a BIT farther than we'd managed to explore in Tokyo, so far. Not very far by Tokyo standards, but we did have to transfer to a different, non JR line to get there. JR, Japan Railways, is one of the largest railway companies in Japan, though there are many other big ones, and even more tiny ones.

Didn't take very much walking from the station to already start seeing interesting stores. We didn't go into this one, but look at all that cloth!! I would love to dig through and find cute patterns, it might even inspire me to finally learn to sew. :p Japan is pretty well known for its craftiness though, so it's kind of nice to imagine what cute little bags and plushies and clothes these fabrics could turn into. :)

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This one, we DID go into, as it is more relevant to my skills. :) Unfortunately it was all rather expensive, or at least comparable to home. But I did pick up a set of needles since the ones I brought with me to knit buns with, I managed to lose 1 of.

We were pretty hungry so the plan was eat first, shop later! Though of course I couldn't resist peeking into a few shops first. It was hard to decide what to eat, but when we saw this charmingly decorated burger place, we had to try it.

I mean who could say no to these pictures. We were also about ready to (literally) eat those pictures.

The area is full of kind of vintage-y, thrift stores, so there was a lot of this sort of decoration around. This particular restaurant was a Hawaiian vintage themed burger restaurant.

Complete with handwritten and illustrated cowboy menu.

We started with drinks, I got a really yummy latte. Kurt's cold drink came with a little container of syrup, which they usually give you to sweeten your cold drinks. It's really convenient because it's easier to mix in than tubes of sugar (for cold drinks).

We agonized over burgers for a while but in the end we ordered exactly what the pair of girls next to us ordered. Kurt got this sort of Japanese themed one....

...and I got the fat obesity-themed chili burger. (warning: do not view this pic on an empty stomach!) It was about as delicious as it looked. :) We both sort of laughed at how we spent the last two days eating American foods (Tex Mex, burgers) after having avoided them so far this whole trip.

And then, let the shopping begin! Here's Kurt shopping at this cute beach themed store, they had really nice clothes there.

One of the larger thrift stores that we went to, I easily found two affordable skirts to take home. I think I might go back....the clothes are just so affordable (and oftentimes more interesting) when they're secondhand. I love thrift shops. :)

Went to a little donut shop Kurt had read about called Hard Donuts, that had lots of interesting flavors like a ginger donut. Here is Kurt eating a tomato donut. O_o According to him it was very very light flavored though, and very much "a Japanese donut" (they are super different from American donuts, more like bread).

This hair salon has a random Spiderman sitting in front of it. Don't know why. It's not called Marvel hair salon or anything. Apparently you can't climb on it but you are free to take pictures of it.

So we spent maybe 4 hours here or so, in the end didn't buy much, but we both agreed that it was a nice little neighborhood. It seemed very quiet and livable, while at the same time having its own little vibe and urban feel, even within Tokyo. Found a shop where I might end up getting a suitcase (I need to buy a rolling one at some point here), and a cat cafe that we almost went to (but they had no space). The cat cafe was surprisingly expensive, like 300yen for 15 minutes I believe? Yikes. Would have tried it just for the experience but at least we got to see the inside of it.

Also, the window opened. I'll just leave that cryptic message there.

After leaving Shimokitazawa, Kurt decided that he wanted to go to Odaiba, which is another place I never managed to go to! It's rather interesting, it's a port/tourist/almost like a park area that's entirely on constructed land. They compacted garbage and sunk it into the ocean and created a whole new area. O_O Crazy! But also inventive and kind of clever. It's a comparatively newer area in Tokyo though, and a very popular date spot.

To get to Odaiba, we had to transfer at Nishi Nippori station, which is where Kurt used to work when he did his study abroad/internship program way back when, and also the reason why he had been to Odaiba many times.

Took a pic of this machine, which is a pretty typical ticketing machine at a railway station. :) Not for any particular reason, just to show you guys I guess. At any given station there'll be a row of maybe 5 of these right before the ticketing gates, so you can purchase a ticket to use at the gates.


Kurt and I both have various "railway cards" that you can add money to, and swipe at the gates (thus bypassing the need to always buy paper tickets). It's way more convenient, and with the incredible amount of traffic that the railway systems get, it would be impossible to ever get anywhere without most people using these railway cards.

The line that brings you to Odaiba has some really awesome views of the sea, and various ports and boats along the way. Something about the vastness of the sea, and seeing THAT much water will never fail to impress me. Especially living in a first world country in the very globalized world of today, to me the ocean seems like one of the last frontiers that we may never be able to fully explore. How about that? We know about galaxies millions of lightyears away from us, but we don't even know the bottom of our ocean. Fascinating.

On a more shallow note, we ended up going shopping in that big building/mall shown in the picture above. They had a huge Forever 21 and H&M there (surprise surprise), but in Japan, these are some of the most affordable stores with recent fashion that you can find. :) And I'm willing to bet that they don't stock the EXACT same things as the American versions of these stores, but maybe a slightly Japanese take on the same styles. At the very least, Japanese sizes of the same styles.

All of the stores in this mall were super trendy and designer-looking. If they weren't name brand (Coach, Marc by Marc Jacobs), then they were like this crazy hat shop, with a cute shiny Beetle in it.

We're pretty blase about high fashion shopping, so we breezed past most of it, but this stylish Japanese-themed crafts store caught our eye. Wabi Sabi.

I absolutely loved (among many, many things in this shop), these little things. Can you guess what they are? They're....(pause for dramatic effect)...ONIGIRI BAGS. You can tell more easily by looking at the ones all the way to the right of the picture but, they're little triangle shaped bags. SO CUTE. The ones underneath those have an additional compartment that you can unzip, that has a little Tupperware container. Just in case, you know TWO WHOLE onigiri aren't enough to satisfy you for a whole meal (I do know how people here get so skinny now, though).


In the end I didn't buy them because the small bag was $10+ and the larger one was $20+ which just seemed exorbitant, no matter how cute the idea. I have earmarked it in my head as one of the first ideas I want to plagiarize when I learn how to sew though! I think these would totally sell in some niche market, or maybe more widely if they were rectangle shaped to hold sandwiches. Although I really really think that the triangleness of the bag is it's unique selling point. Maybe if I included instructions for how to make onigiri, as well as health benefits, then it might become more acceptable in America...

The shopping actually took quite some time and I was feeling pretty tired by the end. Odaiba is a very popular destination, and it was a weekend, so the place was swarming with people. I wanted to go to a cafe and rest, and we'd noticed on a directory that there was a "Gundam Cafe" that I was very keen on visiting. (Gundam is a very popular anime...series? that has been going on for ages. It is maybe somewhat like the Star Trek of Japan.)

We headed in that direction, and it pointed us to outdoors. So we exited the mall and we saw........

This crazy monstrosity.

This picture does a much better job of illustrating how large this thing was. 


We stumbled upon it at a very opportune moment, as there was some show going on. They projected some scenes from Gundam onto a huuuuge screen behind this model, and this machine was programmed to turn on and off, make (very small) movements, and a few other interesting effects, in accordance with what was happening on the screen. It lit up, and at some points, had steam billowing out of it. Really cool, and if you imagine experiencing this with a very excited Japanese audience that loves robots, anime, and mecha, and are very uninhibited in displaying their amazement, you would probably smile and think it was cool too. :) Many many cries of "sugoi!" resounded.

When the brief show ended, we climbed up to the Gundam cafe only to be slightly disappointed that it is not a sit down cafe, but more of a Gundam gift shop that happens to also sell coffee. They did have a lot of interesting Gundam trinkets though, including these Gundam ningyouyaki (those little cake things that we saw that guy making in Asakusa). If it hadn't been so packed with fans, and I hadn't been so tired already, I probably would have browsed around more.

Might even have bought myself a "beam churro". :p lol.

We were hoping to get some food at this point (it was maybe 7 or 8pm) but as it turns out the mall only had 7 or 8 actual restaurants, and when we got to the restaurant floor, EVERY SINGLE ONE had a crazy long line pouring out of it. I was starving, but definitely not ready to wait in some ridiculous line to be overcharged for mediocre food. So we went to Yoshinoya, which had no line to be correctly charged for cheap food.

Oh hehe, the mall has a "smoking room", where smokers can go and shut themselves in in order to bathe themselves in their own sauna of cigarette smoke stench. :| Kind of an apt punishment I guess?? But also kind of pitiable, that people need a cigarette so badly that they shut themselves in a prison just to smoke.

Then we wandered around Odaiba a bit, even though it was pretty late. Unfortunately we didn't manage to see much else but I was sort of all Odaiba'ed out. I did like it there and thought some things were really cool, but all in all I'm not a fan of very manufactured, fancy attraction parks. And even moreso recently, I've been rather bemoaning the signs of modernization, globalization, commercialism and loss of culture that I've been seeing more and more, not just in Japan but all around. Home, and on the internet, for example.

We sat on some benches near this kinda cool installation to rest and talk for a bit. The lights in these doorways change color, and steam or a cold mist periodically wafts up from the floor. It was fun to watch people interact with it, the little shrieks of surprise and "tsumeta~i" (cold). I thought it was really telling that girls would run through once to see, be surprised by the cold, and not go back through, but kids would run back and forth over and over again. When do we get to be so jaded? And when does our natural delight and curiosity in the world leave us? Never completely but it's never the same as running back and forth through sprinklers for hours on end. How sad.

And with that, I'll call it a day. :) It was a memorable day.