Harajuku, Yoyogi Park and Shibuya

Today we ventured slightly south of Shinjuku. Tokyo is a huge city and there are many localities around Tokyo – there is an hour long train ride which takes you around ‘greater Tokyo’ and all of these places are still incredibly crowded, busy, full of retail, restaurants, etc, as if we were in a main city.

Anyway, so 6 minutes south on the train took us to Harajuku. This is a cute, incredibly busy town, known for the largest 100 Yen store ($1 shop?) in the district, and an incredibly packed mall.

Here is the entrance to the mall

Here is the entrance to the mall.. this video doesn’t really do it justice.. in person, you can see the heads of people much further into the distance.

But really, Tokyo is so incredibly busy, especially around the main train stations.. think of when you exit a concert or a football game.. this is the kind of crowds we find ourselves squishing through in some areas. So many people!

Here is an interesting KFC shirt..

We found a very exciting shop that sold all sorts of fashionable accessory knick-knacks; suspenders, crazy socks, crazy glasses, crazy badges.. all the weird funky stuff was all together in one shop. Here is Jesse trying on his dork-lookin glasses he wants to buy, and me trying on some purple protective sunnies?

As we left the mall and moved toward Yoyogi Park we found a line up of people holding FREE HUGS signs – so I did!

I’m such a gumby.

Here is the entrance to the park.. it really was pretty.

Here are some of the beautiful scenes we found within the park, and some historic wine keg thing.

We eventually found ourselves at the centre of the park where there was some sorta shrine. There was a Japanese wedding happening! Some photos..

As we were leaving, we found an incredibly odd friendship. A guy taller than Jesse travelling with a super short guy.

After leaving the park we decided to walk to the nearby locality of Shibuya, known for its outrageous lights apparently. Yep, a very lit up city. Here was a cute bus we saw on the walk.

Jesse found this sign interesting..

… and I found this superman-style telephone box interesting..

And here is the beautiful lit up Shibuya.

Hmm.. so amongst all the lights, what actually was in Shibuya.. I’m not overly sure.. we were tired and didn’t walk inside many places. There was a lot of retail, and lot of places to eat.. a lot of lights. Up the hill and we found numerous “Love Hotels” – where you can pay roughly $45 for a “3 hour rest” (or, a quick fuck.. however you want to word it). Jesse and I were giggling to ourselves watching couples leave these establishments.. they really were interesting though, they make the rooms look incredibly nice and incredibly comfortable, very appealing to the eye. They appear to be ‘professional’ and not very sleezy.. yet they are so.. sleezy in nature. Anyway, so the ‘quick fuck’ hotels was quite interesting to see. We then mosey’d on back down and found the train station and came home

We did find out today that we are outside of the Mt Fuji climbing season, and as a result we cannot climb the mountain. In fact, we can’t even really get to the foot of the mountain without an incredibly long walk – it’s “shut”. Sucks. Majorly. We were really looking forward to it.

Also, not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but fuck me there are no fucking bins here.. we carry our rubbish around for ages until we can actually find a bin. It’s crap.