Our first day in Tokyo, we decided to take it easy in case we were too jet-lagged to do anything. Turned out we were fine, waking up around 5am and making it until about 9:30pm before we crashed.
We wandered around Shibuya (Tokyo’s version of Times Square) and shopped and meandered through a bunch of pedestrian only areas. It was fun. The shopping here is leaps and bounds better than in New York, both for fashion and for random fun stuff.
Although we found out later that America is way better at grocery shopping.
We had lunch at a hidden restaurant called Mo-Mo Paradise. A friend from work was a missionary here and he told us how to find it. Ordering was quite the experience, since there were only a few pictures to point at and all our options were in Japanese. We ordered a combo plate of Sukiyaki and Shabu-Shabu, and here’s what came:
Luckily, the waiter gave us a printed out sheet in English which explained how to properly eat the amazingness in front of us. It was very yummy.
We wandered around some more until we ended up in the Harajuku section of town. We’ll come back here another time to get better pictures. Apparently the weekend is when all the fun happens. But we shopped around. Hello Kitty, Snoopy, and lots of stuffed characters I’ve never seen before were everywhere.
We also found the coolest Disney store ever, and we’re mad at the designers of the Times Square store because they should have made it more like this one.
We headed back to Shibuya to see the crossing at night. It was impressive, but we thought there’d be more neon lights and signs. It wasn’t quite as photogenic and iconic as we had hoped. Not like Times Square.
Btw, one of the things we’re trying to determine on this trip is this: Is New York City the best city in the world? We love it so much, and we claim it all the time, since it’s better than all the other US and European cities we’ve been to, but we have never been able to compare it to Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other Asian cities we’ve heard so much about. So you’ll hear us compare places to New York a lot in this blog.
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