Shibuya and Harajuku

We slept in with the nice blackout curtains in the hotel room, and decided it was a little too late to head to Tsukiji market since the stalls are primarily open for the fish mongers working extremely early hours. We made our way to Omotesando, which is close to Harajuku, grabbing a few donuts on the way. We arrived before most things opened (most opened at 11am), but had a nice stroll through some quiet streets until we made it to Takeshita Street in Harajuku. We got some freshly fried potato chips and the biggest cotton candy I have ever seen.

Spicy Potato Chips, fresh out of the fryer

I’m not holding this out, it’s as close to my body as possible. It’s really that big. 

The cotton candy was strawberry, plain, lemon, melon, ramune, and grape.

Afterwards we stopped into the local Daiso for some Japanese dollar store goodness. We bought several kitchen items and a whole bunch of chair socks (socks for the legs of chairs instead of leg pads). We walked back to Omotesando to catch all the shops that were closed when we originally walked through and to head toward Shibuya. There was a small gallery we found that had a bunch of paintings from a guy who was drawing his art since elementary school - they had examples of his work from each school period. The curator told us he really struggled with reading because he had dyslexia. We really wanted to buy some prints but they didn't have any.

Cute street parallel to Takeshita Street - it was eerily quiet for being so close to the crowds.

Random Italian Villa

Lunch was a meh conveyor sushi place where we had to custom order almost all the fish - they had a bunch of shrimp with toasted cheese, some uni, some salmon roe, and that was basically it on the conveyor. I was also struck by the fact that almost all the staff there were not Japanese.

There were two pieces here, but we forgot to take a picture

On the walk to Shibuya we stopped into Kiddyland, a big toy store and then headed past Shibuya crossing (the famous intersection with tons of parks crossing in all directions) on to a souffle pancake restaurant. I got the classic, which had a honey caramel sauce, and Meghan got the berry and cheese mouse which was not as weird as it sounds. They were fluffy and delicious!

Honey Caramel

Berry with Cheese Mousse

These take 20-30 minutes to make - we saw this guy using a laser thermometer to check the progress 

Books? 

Open?

Bathroom!

We walked through all 8 floors of Shibuya 109, a landmark tower with lots of little fashion stores throughout it.

Store that just had picture booths?

We checked out the Starbucks at the crossing (too packed), and then went into Tokyu department store. Their liquor store had the special release Otokoyama which I bought, after which we decided to head back to the hotel before dinner.

Yes, Penguins on the summer release bottle.

We got out of the station and started walking, not realizing until a while later we had gone the wrong way. We were almost to Coco Ichibanya, the curry restaurant we had wanted to eat dinner at anyway, so we went ahead and finished walking there. We had delicious curry, while surrounded by 5th graders on a trip from an international school in Seattle.

LOOK AT THAT DELICIOUS CURRY WITH CHEEEEEEEEESE

We made our way back to the hotel, got a little tart from the lobby bakery and went up to enjoy it with the view from our room.

Amazingly good for how pretty it looks - usually the looks make up for the taste

Later we went to check out the Don Quixote, a one-stop-shop that has a little of everything, mostly a little tacky and low rent.

We picked up a bottle of umeshu (plum wine) and spent the rest of the evening in the hotel room again.


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