Ninja socks, antiques & karaoke

Hi everyone,

Well, we've come to the end of our Japan trip. 3 weeks sure went fast! Over the last few days we've been exploring different pockets of Tokyo and stumbled across some neat stuff.

We started off in Ueno, an area fairly close to us that has a huge park. The park itself isn't quite what we expected; no open grassy areas to sit on, but lots of neatly manicured looking-gardens (i.e. look but don't interact with it). Ueno Park is also home to the National museum, a zoo and a number of other large museums. Right next to it is a famous shopping street which we checked out (of course!), it was cool because it was a market for locals rather than tourists. We had lunch at a sushi train restaurant, I got to try toro (an expensive cut of tuna, delicious!) but poor Laura only had 2 pieces of rice because she doesn't eat fish. After lunch I bought a pair of ninja socks with sakura designs, and wore them with my jandals which is what they're designed for. I felt like an idiot and took them off a few minutes later.


The other day we went on a mission to Harajuku to find an antiques market in the basement of a famous building that we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. Laura was looking for Edo-period coins and I wanted an antique hairpin. However the universe had other plans: the building was closed for renovations and the market had disappeared (much like the previous antiques flea market we had tried to find). I stopped to ask for directions at a pharmacy which wasx quite an adventure in itself: the poor girl didn't speak any English and tried to ask one of her coworkers, but none of them spoke any English either. I then tried to ask about the Hanae Mori building in my broken Japanese, using the "negative" hand signal (crossing your arms in an X in front of your body) to try to say "closed?", but she still didn't understand. Then to my surprise a customer piped up "that building is closed". I explained to her that we were looking for the antiques market in the basement but she wasn't from around here so asked an older lady behind the counter, who confirmed (i grasped bits of Japanese) that there did used to be an antiques market, but its gone now. She did manage to point us in the direction of a nearby street with lots of antique dealers amongst lots of hand gestures, map-pointing and broken bits of Japanese. So finally we were on our way, i bowed profusely to all kind ladies involved who all bowed back etc. and the poor girl I asked in the beginning looked like she was about to cry, she was so disappointed with herself at not being able to help me!

So we went to the street which turned out to be fine antique dealers and not really what we were looking for, but one of the dealers did tell us about a part of town called Nishi ojikubo, which has a concentration of junky/antiquey stores (perfect!). 15 minutes on the JR Chuo line saw us arriving at this little town and asking a policeman for directions. "Sumimasen, ANTIIKU SHOPPU-wa doko desu ka?" to which he replied "A!!!! ANTIIKU SHOPPU map wa... hai doozo!!" Turns out they have a map of the local area with all the antique dealers marked on it, like a trail you can follow. Fun! So we did a circuit of this little town, it was a really nice part of town away from the hustle and bustle of central Tokyo. The things I'm looking for are called kanzashi and turns out they're quite rare and hard to find. We found a few here and there, some were made of plastic but I managed to find a pair of really nice ones made of tortoiseshell with carved ends. Laura found a set of commemorative Japanese coins, and we also found a whole lot of Japanese handkerchiefs, which they twist & tie on their heads at festivals. Team bandanna!! At only Y200 a pop, we had to get them. Mine has a drum and a blue Japanese pattern on it, Stacy's has the angry Buddha enforcer and apparently is from a hospital :P


To celebrate our last night together in Tokyo, and also because we'd been talking about it all week with our hostel buddies, last night we went to a karaoke bar!! We started off with a few drinks at the hostel where we made friends with a bunch of 4 young British guys (;Team London'), some Americans doing the teaching English thing (Texas and 2 girls), Moran our Israeli friend, a random Brit called Zac ('the fellow in the glasses'), plus us 3 makes quite a crowd. I had bought some extremely fake-looking fake eyelashes for the occasion and got myself all Harajuku'd out with crazy hair, excessive makeup and of course the minnie mouse ears :) (A girl at the club later on even pointed and said kawaii!). It was a most enjoyable evening!




Today is considerably quieter, everybody except me flew out today so I'm just chilling by myself until I head to Bangkok tomorrow. Next post will be from Thailand!

Sayonara!

Oh yeah, here are some random things, a cake factory next to a dentist, a picture of the Tokyo Tower and some interesting-looking sushi (I styled it myself!)