Japan's Journey 2009 - Day 3

Day 3

On the third day, we decided to go to Yokohama, it's a harbor area and in the Yokohama area there is a Chinatown, and we would like to see what's the Japan's Chinatown looks like. When we arrived at Yokohama, we still didn't know what or where we should go, so we figured out to go to those tourism center, and hoped that they could speak English, and true enough, they could, even though a little bit, but at least we could communicate. So after we got the map and direction and also list of places to visit, the Yokohama adventure began :P

It was a whole new experience at Yokohama Bay, where we could walk along the road, saw the sea, watched the horizon, where the sky meet with the sea, it's not like on the beach, but it's also not like a harbour, perhaps the similarities in Singapore is like when we walk along the Boat Quay, but the difference is this one is a sea, not a river.

From the Yokohama Bay, we went to Chinatown, only equipped with map, and intuition :p, and finally we arrived at Chinatown. When we reached there, we suddenly know that, "oh, we've arrived at the right place", there's no wording or banner that says "Chinatown" explicitly, but all the decorations, the ornaments, buildings, and the shops, all yelled the same thing "Chinatown".

Spotted an unique Hello Panda Kitty

From Chinatown, our next destination was the Meiji Jingu Shrine, our friend there said that at this shrine you can feel like you are walking inside a bamboo forest, and it's a beautiful shrine as well. With a lot of expectations we went to this shrine, took the train, changed subway line, took another train, walked a bit, and finally we reached the shrine.

Too bad, we couldn't reach the main building, it's already near the closing time, so we didn't have much time, we were only able to walk like half an hour and we needed to go back to the entrance because the shrine was going to close soon, we couldn't reach the bamboo forest part (T_T), but never mind, it was a beautiful shrine anyway, and no time to keep sulking, there were still a lot of places to visit, and our next destination was to go to Harajuku, yep, the fashion center of Japan. Over there, a lot of cosplayer, it's a heaven for cosplayer, and a lot of shop that sold cosplay costumes, it's another new experience also :P.

In short, Harajuku basically was a long alley with shops at the left and right side, lots of fancy clothes and discounts also, so if you ever want to shop for fancy clothes or cosplay costumes, just go to Harajuku, they have all of that. After that, we took a break for a while, and waited for our friend to come and had dinner together, while we were waiting, I saw a man with a really unique dressing, for my standard, but maybe it's normal for that area, that guy was wearing a full suit, with tie, long sleeve shirt, a coat, and for the bottom he wore a shorts with a matching color, and a formal shoes, in a matching color as well. I was a bit stunned at that time, and thought "How can he walked out of the house while wearing that kind of clothes??", but once again, it's Japan, maybe our standards were different, too bad, didn't manage to took his picture.

After we got the confirmation from our friend, that he was on the way to Ikebukuro, by the way, Ikebukuro was the area where we stayed, we went to the subway and took the train all the way to Ikebukuro, and since yesterday we didn't manage to eat ramen, we decided to get ramen for our dinner at Ikebukuro.

Finally, we could eat Japanese ramen as well here, the ramen is quite nice, and the soup taste was rich, it was a pleasant dinner, after a whole day of journey. After dinner we still went for a small dessert at the Sunshine city, we had ice cream for dessert, very nice chocolate chips ice cream, the ice cream store name was Coldstone, my friend mentioned that back at Singapore, there's a branch of that store, but so far I haven't found it until now.

and the third day ended up with a piece of a very nice apple pie, the apple pie was a gift from our friend there, he worked at a bakery, and he said that this apple pie is the best at Japan, consists of 5 different apple from various places, not sure about the best part, but its true that the taste was very very nice.

so after we ate and chit chat for a while, we went off to sleep, and that's the end of the third day, Oyasuminasai

Japan's Journey 2009 - Day 2

Day 2

We awoke with a fresh mind and fresh strength after a good night sleep, and now it's time to breakfast :p

The good thing about this hotel was they provide breakfast, so we can at least save some cost from "breakfast" budget, and moved it to "have fun" budget, hahahaha.

My first breakfast in Japan consisted of ( clockwise direction ) Vegetable Juice, Rice, Miso Soup, Seaweed, and a plate of Scrambled Egg, Fried Noodle, Fried Potatoes, and Vegetables.

Hm...yummmy yummy, Itadakimasu.......

After we had our breakfast, it's time to pack up to start our 2nd day in Japan, before we started our tour, we explored our surrounding first to familiarize ourself with the environment. We visited a mall nearby our hotel called Sunshine City,

At that mall there's a section dedicated for anime and I got a chance to take picture with a Gundam Model ( it's as tall as me !!! ), dunno whether it was allowed to take picture or not, but we look around, tried to find any sign that forbid us to take picture, didn't find any, took picture, nobody stopped or yell to us, so we assumed that it was ok, hahahaha

and after short exploration at the mall, finally we go to our first real destination in the 2nd day, and it was to go to Akihabara, yep, it's that Akihabara. If one of you is a fan of anime or manga, I believe you ever heard this place being mentioned, at least once in the anime or manga. Perhaps a little explanation about this place, Akihabara is famous for electronic gadget and anime stuff, so if you ever go to Japan and want to search for some electronic gadget, or some anime stuff, i'll strongly recommend to go to Akihabara.

the picture above are a glimpse of Akihabara, quite regret that I didn't take some of the cosplayer picture that time, hehehe, at Akihabara that time was also my first time to buy something from the shop alone, with an almost-to-zero-Japanese-language-skill, lucky the owner seemed understand that we were foreigner and couldn't speak Japanese, so that time only equipped with some basic sign language (point and point :p) managed to buy a dark chocolate donut, quite nice......

after Akihabara, our next destination was the Asakusa Shrine, according to our so called "tour guide" there, whom in fact is Adit's friend, Asakusa is an area where there are a lot of old time style stalls, and a lot of gift also, so there we went to Asakusa, and it's true, even though it's still bright, the feeling is similar like when we went to some celebration, a lot of stalls at the left and right of the walkway, if you know the celebration in the typical Japanese anime, the one with fireworks, stalls, cotton candy, chocolate banana, etc, it will be something like that, but this time it was still bright.

and it was such a coincidence that at that time there was a Matsuri festival, so there were some carnival with a dragon and a cart of Japanese musician dressed like a geisha, with all the white makeup.

bought a takoyaki for snack, hmmm niceeee ......., from Asakusa we moved to Odaiba area, where we can see the Rainbow Bridge, and the Odaiba Marine Park

Rainbow bridge when it's still bright

Odaiba Marine Park Entrance

Rainbow Bridge when its dark

From the Odaiba marine park, we walk to Venus Fort, this place actually is a shopping mall, but with a very nice ambiance and design. The design reminded me to the old Venice style, very nice and unique.

After walked around the Venus Fort, and surveyed all the food that offered inside, we decided to move out from Venus Fort and went to Shinjuku instead to have our dinner, heard that there's a nice ramen shop over there, so off we went to Shinjuku.

My first reaction when I arrived at Shinjuku was, "Man, am I back at Singapore ??? So many people and so crowded here.....", many people were at Shinjuku at that time, perhaps because it was on week end, so they were out to hang out with friends or just went to shop and sight seeing, and we're one of those people :P, went to Shinjuku to try ramen, hehehe.

When we arrived at the ramen shop, turned out the ramen shop was already closed, seems like the market on that day was very good, and they run out of ramen to sell, we couldn't have the ramen on that day, so saaad.... (T_T), so we needed to decide on what should we ate for dinner, and in the end Curry was our decision for dinner, so off we went to have Curry. We went to a place called Matsuya, I think it's equivalent to Yoshinoya at Singapore, and we experienced an unique way to order food, we went to a vending machine, chose what kind of food we wanted to eat, put in some coins, and voila, we got a ticket to be exchanged with food.

Finally, the real Japanese curry, it's not really spicy but it was hot, like they put a lot of pepper inside instead of chilly, but overall it was nice.

Japanese restaurant usually serve free plain water, so we don't need to order for drinks. After we finished our dinner and rested for a while, it's time to go back to hotel and slept, to prepare the energy and stamina for the 3rd day of our trip.