Respite for the day.

Our 3rd home. It was sheer torture with 20kg x 2 bags. But kind souls helped us.

Post-trip:

If you're missing Singapore, I guess, you can find chilli crabs here...for exorbitant prices. This is, by the way, situated right beside Shinagawa Prince Hotel.

We did not expect the transfer from Shinagawa to be torture.

Shinagawa station was alright, but trying to transfer to the Tokyo Metro line...well...the transfer station had no lifts. Thinking about it, we should have probably stopped at Akihabara (a larger station) and walked 15 minutes to the hotel.

This is us, trying not to get lost.

This is me, trying to drag a 23kg (or maybe more) luggage up 3 flights of stairs. Not fun. Erfa was worser off, even with a slightly lighter luggage. This is the reason why I can do shoulder press at gym now. This, and carrying 3.5 kg of things on my shoulder everyday for 6 hours.

Our third hotel was Hotel Edoya, set in a quiet neighbourhood with 400JPY lunch sets galore. I had thought that we would reach around 11:30am but after the problem with lifts (or lack of, rather) we only reached past 12:00.

The hotel does look like the pictures they advertise. It's a quaint small hotel with really retro lifts (a fan that was affixed to the wall of the lift would only switch on when the lift was moving). The lift could fit two people with 2 luggages but no more. Our room was on the fifth level. Not taking the lift was a nono.

We stepped out to a brightly-lit extremely enclosed corridor that does nothing good to a claustrophobic person. (I would not like to be there during a black-out. Thankfully, the rolled-out blackouts were done with when we were in Japan). Light music played in the background. I think we were the only guests on that level. That was the first element of creepiness that we experienced since we landed in Japan. (Well that could be the second, if you count the Japanese style room at Hakone.)

We booked a Japanese style room, and a person was cleaning other rooms when we reached our floor. (Why the person was cleaning unoccupied rooms, I have no idea.)

We entered the room, and a black (yes, it's darker than dark) passage on the left crept us out. We got the cleaning lady to show us the lights, and it turned out to be a short passage to the toilet, sink and bathroom. The switches were at the end of that passage - into the darkness. Stuff of nightmares. Needless to say, we left those lights on every night. 2nd creepy element.

Checking out the darker than dark passage.

We explored our room - it was quite big, to our surprise. Although it's the smaller twin Japanese style room.

The room had different sections: The outer room, consisting of the threshold (where you have to take your footwear off) and the creepy passage; The inner room, (there's a door between outer room and inner room) which is partitioned into two sections - sitting and sleeping. There was an emergency exit of sorts with complicated instructions in English at the sitting room.

The sitting room consisted of a table, a shelf, television and a fridge. It is separated from the sleeping section by a small wooden framework - something like a gate of sorts.

The futons were already laid out - a single and a double futon. Something I noticed - the heads of the futons were at windows. I wonder if there's a reason because it was the same with the hotel at Hakone.


After resting a bit and dumping our luggage, we decided to explore a bit. Everything was on the 8th floor. The shared baths, the rooftop balcony, the tv lounge. There was no one.

At this point, I was already starting to doubt if I had chosen the wrong sort of place to stay. But really, it was because of the earthquake.

We decided to go to Akihabara first because there we had no time to go anywhere further. We had the receptionist, and old man in his 60s or 70s to point the way. He gave us a map and drew where we were supposed to turn, and we were off.

The start of Akihabara.

And one of the first shops we saw was...

Yes! A halal place where we thought was not possible! We stood outside the building, marveling at our find. An employee gave us the salaam and invited us in, but we declined. But we promised to come afterwards, when we were done with our walk.

Walk we did.

We went to Taito arcade building and I won myself a little something.

We were actually not allowed to take photos, and we didn't know until a store employee stopped us. Nevertheless, some shots were already taken.

I won this on first try on the UFO machine. Never this lucky in SG though. :( Erfa actually was asking me what on earth I was aiming at. And then we both gasped when it fell!

I didn't dare go further than the 4th floor (or was it 5th? I don't recall).

We went to various other places, including Don Quixote, Animate, random souvenir shop we ran into while trying to find a cat cafe, the cat cafe and the halal place to eat, in no particular order.

Well, the cat cafe was the last. We reached around 5:30pm Japan time and we stayed for slightly over half an hour.

The cats sniffed around when we were came in, because we had food on us, but soon lost interest and went to curl up at various nooks and crannies of the shop, away from the hands.

"Go away already."

Back at the hotel, we spent the rest of the evening was spent doing laundry (on the 8th floor), and took (free) coffee/tea at the reception area while we waited. We saw a couple of guests as well. One went over to the computer corner and the other went up from the restaurant (presumably).

The biscuit is ours though.

Be it home or away, we must always read the news! By the way, this was the first time I saw the news about Obedient wives' club wanting to opening a branch in Singapore. Yes, it even reached Japan. I wonder sometimes, if the Japanese think we are nuts. Only the weird news are in there.

Thus end of 5th day.

Checklist
Check in to Hotel Edoya

1. Asakusa
FAILED. After getting lost, hauling 20kg of luggage up and down the stairs, we just...couldn't face the subway again, for that day.

1. Kappabashi (closes at 5pm)
2. Asakusa Kannon Temple
3. Nakamise-dori
4. (optional) Asakusa Kannon Onsen



2. Akihabara (shops close at 8pm)




1. (optional) cat cafe


2. gadgets shopping Well, we found one thing for waiyin...


3. doujin shopping


4. Don Quixote

Additional:


5. Playing arcade at Akihabara

The way to a longer life...

... According to my theory, is lots of stairs and no rubbish bins.

Stairs are everywhere! So is a lack of rubbish bins. And steep slopes to every place of interest.

This is inside the tokyo tower by the way.

Post-trip

So we went up to the special observation deck. There was a long queue and it cost another 600 yen.

I couldn't see much difference in the scenery for that extra 100m. It was just foggy everywhere!

Somewhere beyond, there must be Mt. Fuji....Somewhere...

I remembered somewhat vaguely from Japan Hour that there was a "see-through" floor at Tokyo Tower, so we circled around the deck a couple of times, trying to find it. No luck, so we didn't stay long there. The space was kind of small anyway.

We went down, back to the main observatory via the lift, and then to the level below it. There was a small shrine, a cafe, and an open space where gigs were held.

And then we saw it.

It didn't feel scary looking down that 150m to the foot of the tower. It just didn't feel real (thus not scary), but it was!

Afterwards we went to the "Foot town", 4 levels at the base of the tower which consists of souvenir shops (with ugly magnets), wax museum (which we didn't go into because I'm already freaked out by BJD, I don't want to see life-size ones) and some other eateries. I'm not sure if there's an aquarium or if I mixed that up with Wing Takanawa (the shopping centre at our hotel).

The Hello Kitty machine reminded me of a certain colleague, so I decided to buy one for her. I believe in buying things for people, if I look at the things, and they reminded me of the person.

We couldn't go back the way we came...

After confirming with the information counter, our way back to the hotel was via the Daimon station.

It was a very long walk :(

It took us around 20 minutes or so, past some buildings, a cemetery, a huge temple, and even a huge gate, heralding the Daimon town, aptly called...Daimon (Big Gate ?)

The roads were pretty quiet, kind of surprising for a tourist area. I guess most tourists are staying away after all.

A side note here: entrances to subway stations are pretty sneaky. They tend to get wedged between two shops. One can easily mistake it for stairs leading to some seedy place.

We picked up our 1000 yen discount coupon at the counter for asking them to not do housekeeping for our room, but we didn't manage to find the time to spend it :(

We spent our evening experiencing cinema in Japan - It was quite an experience.

1. It's blardy expensive. Or it could be that it's because it's hotel cinema. Ordinarily, it would have cost us around SGD30, but since we were lodging at the hotel, it cost around $12-15.
2. At least their cinema seats were wide...it's kind of like Cathay. Very comfy.
3. Melon soda sucks. It tastes like those banana cordial drinks with carbonated water.
4. The most important thing to note! We realised that it's not only done on the streets...Japanese people RETURN their food trays to the counters, no matter what! When we bought the drinks, they were placed in a basket-tray. And we had to take it with us when we left the cinema, separate our rubbish to flammable and non-flammable, and put the basket-tray back at the counter.
   
   Initially we left the basket-tray behind (you know, like what we do at the cinemas here) but this old man, who, for whatever reasons, came to watch Paradise Kiss...alone, kept pointing at the basket-tray. (Please lah, if we can watch the movie unsubbed, we surely know how to understand some Japanese). So anyway, we went back to our seat and retrieved the basket-tray.
   
   Actually, I think we should implement this in cinemas here...but then again, think of all those teenagers we're putting out of jobs...

Thus we spent our last night at Shinagawa...

Checklist: 5 June (Sun) Harajuku, Shibuya, Ebisu & Tokyo Tower

1. Harajuku
1. Harajuku (johnnys shop)
2. Takeshita Dori
3. Daiso
4. (optional) Uniqlo
2. Shibuya
1. Take photo with Hachiko at shibuya
2. find a weird vending machine FAILED
3. Ebisu Garden Place
4. Hiroo Mosque / Arabic Islamic Institute (Ebisu/Hiroo)
5. Tokyo Tower

Ebisu

Hanadan!

Post-trip:

The next stop was in search of Ebisu Garden Place, where this famous Hana Yori Dango scene happened.

From Ebisu JR station, it was quite a long travelator ride / walk to Garden Place.

"Ebisu Skywalk"
But I couldn't see any sky!

We finally got out of Skywalk...

This is Ebisu Garden Place. It was pretty quiet and felt a lot like an "atas" place.

...waiting for Domyoji who never turned up...

Oops, I guess we got the wrong day.

Next item on the itinerary was the Hiroo mosque, one stop after Ebisu (Hiroo station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza line). We thought it'd be easy to find...we thought wrong.

We had to pass a bank, a park, a hospital, a bunch of office buildings and apartments AND the Chinese Embassy before we got to the mosque.

This is not a park. This is a jungle.

It was a good 20 minutes walk to the mosque, and since we were near the Chinese Embassy, there was a LOT of policemen standing guard (or at least I presumed that's the reason why there's a lot of them - one every 50 metres or so.)

We had to keep flashing the map at the policemen (I call it relieving their boredom) and 5 policemen later, we finally found the mosque.

The mosque reminds me a lot of the one at Eunos. (unrelated) There's a graveyard beside it! Kind of creepy, since no one except for the guard (who also doubles up as the bilal) was around. I wanted to get out of there fast fast fast.

View outside the mosque. The graveyard was just below. Muslim graveyard? Shinto graveyard? Buddhist graveyard? No idea.

Our next destination: Tokyo Tower.

After questioning the guard at the Chinese Embassy, we decided that the best way there was the 20 minutes back to the subway station, and stopping at Kamiyocho station (still on the Tokyo Metro Ginza line).

On the way, I saw something curious - a door that stated Yoshitaka Amano. I still wonder if, could it be the Yoshitaka Amano?

We also received salaam from a passing guy with another guy, who I assumed was going to the mosque.

Tokyo Tower was another (literally!) uphill route, and we sort of tailed a young couple to the tower.

Tokyo Tower!
Unbelievable but we were there!

And then it was there, rising above us - something we've only seen on screens so far.
We went all the way to the top - to the special observatory tower (250m), where we were supposed to be able to see Mt. Fuji, but sadly, the foggy weather didn't permit us to see it. We did see a few interesting scenes.

Dratted weather

For example, there were quite a number of cemeteries scattered throughout Tokyo. From the tower, we could see that all temples had cemeteries beside them.

We could someone see Odaiba (the island) from the tower too.

Observe the building at the left side of the picture. Now see it zoomed in, and marvel at my camera's zoom! :D

Tokyo Tower to be continued in the next post...

Harajuku

"Outside Harajuku Station"

Where you can wear anything!

So, we're queuing for the 11am slot for johnnys shop, at erfa's behest. She'd better buy something! The queue is insane!

Post-trip:

This day was pretty packed. Since it was our last day at Shinagawa, we decided to visit all the places we wanted to see at the east of Tokyo.

The first stop was Harajuku, the fashion pop-culture district in Tokyo. After Erfa grabbed her Johnny's stuff (we stood in the queue for about 40 min, and all they had were photographs for sale? :( ), we went to Takedori street, which is like Bugis Street... I hate the crowd.

Entrance of Takedori Street

Random Hello Kitty guy?

Lost spiderman

I know why Erfa took this pic. >:)

We spotted some really cute socks at Takedori, but it was really too short, so we didn't buy.

The next stop was Shibuya, in search of the famous Hachiko statue.

We got lost for a bit, trying to get out of the station (all the stations are like Dhoby Ghaut). There was a LOT of people, and then we finally spotted it...

"Hachiko"
It's quite small, actually.

See? The photographs always make it look bigger.

Trying to figure out where the halal shop is.

The famous Shibuya crossing...we crossed!

I'm pretty sure these people are posing. o_O;

After lunch, the next stop was Ebisu, where the famous Domyoji waiting for Tsukushi scene happened!