Tokyo - Day 3

 These are Trev socks that he got at Family Mart as a souvenir they have branded with the family mart colors. He says they’re the best socks ever.

This morning we got up and went to the Meji Jingu Shrine. I would say the shrine itself was maybe a bit less impressive versus some of the others we’d seen, but the surrounding area was very beautiful. It was a wooded area with paths and Tori gates leading to the shrine. 

We had read that on weekends you may see weddings at this shrine, and we saw two wedding processions

Part of the shrine were some optional gardens and we decided to go walk around in those areas

We laughed because the beautiful pond that’s supposed to be there was just a mud pit

This is a sake barrel installation at the shrine

From there, it was a short walk to Harajuku Street. This is a street with lots of quirky street food and vendors and a lot of clothing shops selling clothing. Typical to the Kawaii culture in Japan.(cute culture). 

If you zoom on on the picture above, you’ll see how many people there were it was very very crowded. I did enjoy our walk and we had some very delicious food, but you were just dodging people the entire time. It was a bit crazy. Sort of hard to keep track of all five of us although it was pretty easy to spot Joel and Trev as they were usually ahead above everybody else The kids have been very into Pokémon go, which has been great because it helps to pass the time in the boring parts of the trip. It does drive me crazy that their face is in their phone the entire time, but they are teenagers and they need to do what they’re interested in

The Harajuku area is well known for their crêpes. There are quite a lot of crêpe stands. So of course, we had to try them out. I think they had about 80 different kinds of crêpes. There were diagrams of each one and then you ordered by number

I ordered this fruit crêpe

Trav got this one with a slice of chocolate cake inside of it

And I got this one which had chocolate gelato inside of it

Joel got this strawberry whipped cream and custard one

And Owen got this one with berries and vanilla ice cream

Cheers

The crêpes were delicious, but we still needed to eat a proper lunch Trev got this karaage chicken with melted cheese on it

Fix to come at the end of the Korean corn dogs that the kids and I had cause they’re on Trev’s phone. Another specialty of the area is coloured stringy cheese inside different types of bread. We didn’t end up trying this.

Crowds

I was trying to get a picture of Trevor and Joel being ahead above everyone else

Trevor had been researching a certain watch before we left Canada. It’s a swatch brand watch that is a replica of a watch. Astronauts used to wear in one of the space missions. It’s swatch brand They had a swatch store in Harajuku so Trev checked it out and sure enough they had the watch so Trev bought it. We even got tax free.

They had about eight different versions of this space watch. Trev picked the one he liked best  then when he brought it to the counter, they said OK you can buy that watch but just so you know we also have a secret version of the watch that we don’t have on display. Would you like to see that one and they brought out a second watch so then Trev had to decide whether he wanted the original watch he had picked or the secret watch in the end, he chose the secret watch, which is the gray version you can see that two watches below

Trevor pretty excited about his New watch

After that, we walked over to Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  I expected it to be more like a formal garden, but it was just really a humungous park with all different sections with trees and what not that were in different themes so there was a Japanese section a more formal garden section a greenhouse section, etc. there were a ton of Japanese people out enjoying the beautiful sunny day sitting on the grass (dead grass still 😆), throwing a football playing with their kids, etc. The sun was shining and I was actually even able to take off my sweatshirt and just wear my T-shirt for a little while it felt glorious we had a great time walking around the grounds A Pokémon event had also started. The kids were catching 1 trillion Pokémon.

 

Kids appease me and posed for this photo

The kids Pokémoning behind me

There was an acrobat true practising

This is how we spend so much of the day waiting for trains at train stations

From there, we went over to Shibuya and we got to see the famous Shibuya scramble crossing. It is the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world and at peak times 2 to 3000 people cross on each light change.

We had tickets to Shibuya sky, which is a big tower that you can go up and see the views of Tokyo

We sat up there for over an hour until the sun started to set

Practising my Japanese poses. Watching people pose up here was hilarious. There were lineups for popular places, and we waited in one of them and the people at the front would do at least 50 different poses and camera angles. It was really funny to watch. gotta get that perfect Instagram shot

You can see Mount Fuji at the top of this pic if you look carefully

From there, it was just a few minute walk to the pepper parlour robot restaurant. It was OK. The food was OK. The robot was OK now that we have AI and you can have conversations with AI. The software on these robot seems a little dull. It could sing preprogrammed songs and it could chat with you, but it wasn’t very smart.  In hindsight, it may be wasn’t worth using one of our meals in Japan to get this food, but it wasn’t an interesting experience nonetheless

The funniest part of the night was when Anna picked one of the pre-programmed songs on the robot, which was please, please please by Sabrina Carpenter The robot would sing the songs in a cute little robot voice we assumed it was going to sing the clean version, but it’s saying the real lyrics: “I beg you don’t embarrass me motherfucker!”  Not censored at all. So funny!

There were little robotic trays that were meant to deliver your food to your table, but honestly, they kept screwing up and eventually a waitress would just carry your food over

Got these pancakes for dessert to split because we wanted to try the Japanese soufflé pancakes, but I don’t think these were really the Japanese soufflé pancakes. They just were like regular Canadian pancakes.

After dinner, we were tired and we wanted to head back to our room, but we first needed to go and walk across Shibuya scramble, crossing at least once This is a picture of the boys trying to find a specific location, where one of the shows that they like was filmed Not sure we ever found it exactly

Snapped a quick picture of Hachinko statue before heading back to our Airbnb. We got back to our room at about 8 PM and spent some time packing up it was really nice being in Tokyo for seven nights because we didn’t have to live out of our suitcases too much but we are off to Kyoto tomorrow so we had to get everything packed. It was another busy day today 26,600 steps!

Here are a few pics from Trev’s camera - out of order.