Adventures of a Red-head in Japan: Tokyo!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted, lol. Since the rice harvesting nothing exciting has happened. Just school and nomikai's and restaurants and karaoke. Nothing out of the ordinary, haha. I did get recruited to meet with Japanese students who are practicing English to have conversational practice with them. It's fun! They're all really good at English, so we English-speakers basically teach the slang and idioms and stuff, or just let them practice their speaking where otherwise they can't.

Anyway, last weekend was the school festival (bunkasai in Japanese, or culture festival)! Or rather, Sunday and Monday were the school festival, because we had a typhoon on Saturday. I swear those things follow me. We even had one in Ohio during my freshman year of college. It was a freak windstorm and I firmly believe it was there only to spite me.

Well anyway the school festival was a lot of fun. There were lots of stalls set up selling food; everything from traditional Japanese food to tacos to chocolate covered bananas to Middle-Eastern food to Chinese food. Plus drinks! Bubble tea, banana juice, milkshakes. Too much food! I definitely ate a TON over the course of one day and spent $10 doing it. haha. They also had various performances; for example most of the clubs on campus put together a stall and/or a show and/or a gallery of some sort. For example, there were exhibitions on Latin American culture, the photography club had a room filled with pictures, the tea ceremony club had a room where they sold tea and showed off their tea ceremony skills. The music clubs also had rooms, but they also had designated performance times in the gym and on the main stage. There is a rock and roll club, a jazz band club, and an acoustic guitar club, who all performed. There were also multiple zemis, or seminars, which are like classes but they don't meet at regular times, and they all had their own performances. For example, on of my friends performed in an English language production of King Lear, and another performed in a Japanese production of Hairspray. Both were good.

Anyway yeah wow that paragraph got huge hahaha. It's all good though. I had a lot of fun, hung out with friends and supported other friends. It was over all a great day.

I didn't got to the festival on Monday because my friends and I went to Tokyo on Monday and Tuesday! As expected, Tokyo is exhaustively big and very expensive. >_>; But I had fun! And we saw all the most important parts of Tokyo in small spurts. Haha. We'll go back and see it in greater detail later. Anyway I took a lot of pictures (because I somehow coerced my camera to be functional again--it wouldn't at the festival D: ), so I'll put some of them up here according to each place we went to.

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is known to house the busiest subway station in the world. And you can tell because when you walk through that train station it takes about 10 minutes to get from one side to the other and it's crowded all the way through. >_>; Ridiculous. I also went here when I first arrived in Tokyo, expecting to see some friends, and I wandered around the outside of the station, which is connected with a department store, making it even BIGGER. Anyway, it's a pretty big shopping district and also houses the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which we did not go to. haha.

You can have big city-looking Shinjuku like above, or back-alley Shinjuku like right, where you can find good eateries. We found a delicious ramen shop that beats the one we found in Mishima.

Harajuku
Harajuku is known as the fashion capital of the world, because it's a HUGE shopping district with thousands a shops of hundreds of styles and varieties. It's rather amazing. It's also famous for it's Sundays: on Sundays, young people from all over Tokyo gather and dress in unique (or crazy, however you want to describe it) outfits, such as gothic lolita, absurdly bright colors, etc. etc. Unfortunately, we went on a Monday, so we missed all the fun. But there will be other days. There will be others.

There are two main shopping streets: Takeshita-dori and Omotesando. Takeshita-dori is a much more narrow side-alley like street that is crammed to the brim with shops. They're even stocked on top of each other. Omotesando is the classier, more expensive road, with a big fancy mall that does not permit you to take pictures inside. >_>;

This is Takeshita-dori. As you can see, it's crammed. I didn't take pictures of Omotesando because it didn't look like anything special at the time. haha.

Meiji Jingu - Meiji Shrine
Meiji Jingu is a shrine dedicated to the deified spirit of the Emperor Meiji (who opened Japan up to the west at the end of the 19th century) and his wife. We actually visited this first before heading of Takeshita-dori, and there was, fortunately, a lovely festival happening commemorating the creation of a new branch of the Shinkansen (bullet train) that goes to Tokyo to Aomori, the very tip of Japan before the bay before Hokkaido. It was pretty neat. They had these cool statues up and everything, and later along Omotesando they had a parade for it too.

The shrine from the front and as you walk through. It's huuuuge! Apparently is 175 acres. In the middle of Tokyo.

The decorations they had up:

To be honest I'm not really sure what purpose these constructions had but they looked cool so I took pictures! :D

Here are videos of the parade that was held on Omotesando later that evening. They're broken into parts because there was some space between the parts of the parade and my camera can only handle so much. xD; As far as I know they weren't saying anything in particular...that's just a typical parade/festival chant thingy. lol.

Shibuya
Shibuya is also a major fashion center of Tokyo, but less so than Harajuku. I think it's more famous for it's night life--it's like the playplace of Japan. We went here for dinner! Ironically...we ate pizza. At Sbarro's. But it was good pizza. I was a happy camper. Shibuya is also home to the busiest intersection in the world. My god, there were so many people. I was literally amazed.

And here's a picture of one part of Shibuya we walked through....just for good measure. Hah.

That's the end of day 1. Or at least the end of the pictures of day 1, lol. It was a busy day. But not as busy as day 2! x_x;

Ueno Park

Ueno Park is...a park. There wasn't much to see here because we didn't want to go to any museums, but there is a lot too offer. Three museums, a concert hall, a zoo, and three shrines make up the park and it's huge space. It's a pretty big park. While we were there, there were some people singing. They were actually really good.

Akihabara
Akihabara is like a geek's paradise. Not only is it the electronics center of Tokyo, but it's also infamous for being full of anime and video game stores. You can find weird stuff like maid cafes (cafes where you go in and are served by a girl dressed in a maid costume) in Akihabara. We also did not spend much time here, but I have a few pics.

Asakusa
Asakusa is kind of a more historical part of Tokyo, known for its various temples. We went to the Senso-ji Temple, which was quite large. We also ate lunch there--okonomiyaki. Yum!

The smoking thing on the middle right is an incense burner, used to purify yourself of bad spirits while in the temple.

To the right is my bad fortune paper! At this temple, you put in 100 yen, and you get to shake a stick out of a hole in a box, which will tell you a number, and you use open the drawer that has that number on the front. The paper inside that drawer will tell you your fortune. My fortune was bad, so I had to fold up this paper and tie it to the fence to rid myself of the bad spirits. Afterwards, I purifed myself at the incense burner and then prayed at the temple on the top right after throwing in a lucky golden 5 yen coin. Hopefully now I have rid myself of bad spirits. :)

Tokyo Tower

Well, I don't think I need to describe this. lol. The tower only serves as a radio and television antenna....it's not really historically important or anything. The only reason it's famous is because it looks like the Eiffel Tower. haha. Oh well. It was cool to go up. We went at night, so we saw the night view, except my camera freaks out when it can't use flash in the dark so I didn't get many good pictures. x_x;

There's a lot of stuff inside the tower too, like restaurants and gift shops and a wax museum. It's basically a giant void that sucks away all of your money. But hey, the Ben & Jerry's ice cream was delicious!