day 62! shibuya, takadanobaba

Announcement! Today is my official 2 month asianniversary. I've been gone from home for 2 months! It doesn't sound that long, and honestly it doesn't FEEL that long thinking about it right now, until I go back to pictures from day 1 and day 2. Wandering around Taipei with all my siblings and my family, fresh with the excitement of being on vacation and in Asia. I tried not to lose that feeling, but I know it's dwindled, somewhat. :) I do like to browse back to those pictures though, to remind myself how lucky I am to have had this opportunity to be here, and of all the things I've experienced thus far, and to not take the rest of my trip (short thought that may be) for granted.

That said, I decided to spend the day doing what I've been doing for most of the past 2 months: shopping. Principles be damned. The stuff I saw at Forever21 was too cute and affordable to forget about, so I went back to Shibuya, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work.

The Forever 21 in Shibuya is HUGE. It has 5 floors, and while each floor isn't a warehouse, it's big enough to take me a good 10 minutes or so to make a loop and pick what I want to try on. Each floor has its own fitting room, and you're only allowed 6 items at a time, so that really slowed me down. :/

They have a lot of cute dresses out right now, it being summer and all, and I was keen to get some of those since they look really loose and comfortable. It's interesting, I feel like a lot of the clothes in Japan are sort of loose fitting. They tend not to wear things skin-tight, or if they do, they'll layer something loose over it. It's pretty different from the American style of tank top + butt hugging jeans, but I sort of like it...it's still attractive but in a more demure, tactful way. Boobs, butt cracks, arms, legs hanging out everywhere just doesn't look very graceful now does it.

Unfortunately the dresses were a bust. Loose flowy fabric makes me look I'm expecting a cloth baby any minute now. :( But I did find a bunch of other stuff that I liked, and I walked out a couple of hours later with a huge sack of loot. O_O Maybe more like a barge. Haha no I'm kidding, but I did get about 10 things, mostly shirts.

Felt too guilty to do much more shopping after that, but I DID feel like eating. :) Edwin was free so we met up and wandered around trying to find food. It's hard because both of us are pretty amicable eaters, and don't have much of a preference, but in the end we went to Pomme no Ki, which, according to the sign outside, is famous for it's omu-rice. Omu is short for "omelette" and rice is rice. Omu-rice is when they make fried rice, and wrap it in egg to make an omelette of rice. I used to have to make omu-soba (you guessed it, soba wrapped in egg) at the okonomiyaki restaurant! :)

Here's the menu, they had about 3 pages of different kinds of omu-rice! They also had pastas and casseroles but looking at the plastic food outside, the omu-rice looked HUGE and delicious so we both wanted that.

You can see at the bottom of the menu that there are 4 sizes of omu-rice, and it tells you how much rice and how many eggs go into each one. I got a S size, which is 2 bowls of rice and 3 eggs. Edwin was going to get an S as well but I badgered him into getting one size bigger cuz I'm sick of him always eating as much as I do even though he's so much bigger! XD Yes. Horrible isn't it. So I did the honorable thing and made him size up so I wouldn't have to size down. :3 ke ke ke.

Here's mine! Omu-rice + katsu + curry. Don't let looks deceive you, that plate was huge. The omu-rice was the size of my face (har har <insert planet jokes here>. quiet, whale.)

Here's what Edwin got, it was 2 different flavors, 1 was like cream of mushroom, and the other was "hayashi" sauce? It was a flavor included in a lot of the options but I don't really know what hayashi sauce is. I sampled a bit of it, and it was really good!! But I can't compare it to any other flavor I know. Something like a strong beef stew or something.

It was a bit of a struggle but we both finished. :3 I had to eat half of his but we got there. Haha no I'm kidding. I tried but I had to give up after I threw up. Nope kidding again. We finished with only minor sweats breaking out.

Felt like walking around to digest the omu-rice. Saw a Crocs shop in Shibuya, with little Croc men to greet you.

Took Edwin to Zara, hoping that maybe we could find something on the men's floor that would spark his interest, but not only are the clothes extravagantly expensive, they were all a little too out there, I guess.

They did have cool graffiti-like artwork along the walls of the staircase though.

After some more walking, it was time to go back to Takadanobaba for my daily hair appointment. On today's agenda was bleach round #2.

Mostly the same drill, they covered my hair in foul acidic stuff, I sat there for a while (should I be worried that my scalp didn't hurt as much?) and after a while Meg washed it out of my hair about 20 times. I thought orange hair was going to be about as shocked as I would get, but lo and behold, blonde blonde hair is just about as far from orange as orange was from black. Never in a thousand years would I have thought that I would be blonde, or even look ok as a blonde. Especially since most asians that I see go blonde, I'm not a fan of. Even the ones that look good, I feel like would look better with normal black hair. But I really didn't hate it.

And that's why I'm so glad I went through with this whole hair experiment. It was a risk and it could have been terrible, but at least I'd know, then. And it wouldn't be as bad as PAYING to get it done, and it being terrible. But instead I got to try it and I DO like it and now that option will always be open to me. :)

Anyway. After the bleaching, they started in on the cutting. The day of the contest would be the actual final cut, but for the time being they were going to go ahead and get started on shaping the hairstyle. Or, in Meg's case, on visualizing what possible hair style she might eventually want to get around to doing. lol.

She called in lots of different coworkers to help her think about/discuss what the might do. Cuz that's how she is, she's always saying things like "I'm so screwed...omg...please help me!!! T^T (actually that face really suits her)" and her coworkers kind of laugh and are like "meg will be meg" and help her out.

Then she debates back and forth and moans and deliberates, and says "oh well, may as well cut". Then picks up her scissors and snips the whole bottom off. I'm like ?!?!?!??! WOMAN PLEASE. O_O don't you 'whatever' my hair away. lol.

It wasn't any huge changes, but they cut off the permed, curly part at the bottom, so I had a blunt bob. She also trimmed my bangs quite a bit wider so they were no longer hiding my eyes. And shortened it quite a bit. She was wondering whether or not to have my eyebrows show, to which I prayed NO because my eyebrows are really distinctive and I think it'd be really creepy to have them show.

She also cut some "staircases" (?) in the hair. She kept saying that word, and I think she wanted to have one half of the hair be very like rigid and square, so it looks sort of like a staircase, and the other side be more fluid and wavy. Yah, it's fashion, go figure.

But in the end, it turned out ok. I mean, she's still brainstorming and this is not the final bit at all, but she fixed it so that its somewhat ok to be seen in public (even though the two sides aren't symmetrical) and sent me home.

I'm starting to get the feeling that although she frets and runs around like a headless chicken a lot, Meg is pretty competent. When she starts doing something, she really does focus on it and give it her best. So I am relaxing a little bit, but I feel like I am in good hands. Also, even though she wears makeup and eyelashes and has brown hair like your typical Tokyo girl, I really like her hair and clothing and everything. They're very...pretty but not too girly or crazy? So I trust that her taste is aligned with mine. :)

Tada. You've all seen it on Facebook already but here I am as a blond staircase.

And so ends day 3 of the Crazy Haircut Experiment.