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What’s for Breakfast?
Started the day at 7 am. The cool weather made me roll around for another 45 minutes before I dragged myself out of bed to meet Chad downstairs for breakfast. I was expecting bacon and eggs, but the free hotel breakfast was a continental buffet style selection of, buns and hard boiled eggs. Ahh well. It’s free, so can’t expect much. Eggs were delicious though. Different from the ones we have in Singapore.
First stop, Edo-Tokyo!
The trip to the Edo-Tokyo started with us asking this nice 7-11 counter lady for directions. Yes we were 2x lost for a while. Eventually we found the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum. It’s actually a park that holds many old buildings from the ordinary middle class Japanese experience to the homes of wealthy and powerful individuals such as former Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo.
The museum allows you to enter and explore a wide variety of buildings of different styles, periods, and purposes, from upper-class homes to pre-war shops, public baths (sentō), and Western-style buildings of the Meiji period, which would normally be inaccessible to tourists or other casual visitors, or which cannot be found in Tokyo.
Volunteers!
The park, amazingly, is run by elderly volunteers! Old people that act as guides for visitors, some sit inside the houses, maintaining the fireplaces inside. I thought it was just for show, until we struck up a conversation with one of them, and realized the fireplace had to be constantly lit to keep the building in shape. The soot from the fire coats the roof and wood, driving away insects! Then he said the house we were standing in was over 250 years old.
Like, wow. A hundred times older than me. Imagine all the generations of people this particular home has seen. With his limited english he said he visited Singapore as well, 10 years ago, and there were no wooden houses in sight. Everything was concrete! haha. Nice guy. so chill to come here after you retire, just showing people around, sitting around fireplaces telling stories eh?
Shibuya + Shopping!
We completely skipped shopping at Shibuya the last time we were here, so this time we headed straight for Shibuya 109-2, the mens equivalent of Shibuya 109. Some background story in case you don’t know, the Shibuya 109 Building is very popular among young people, especially teens, and it is famous as the origin of the kogal subculture. Kogals are known for wearing platform boots, a miniskirt, copious amounts of makeup, hair coloring (usually blond), artificial suntans, and designer accessories.
Yes everyone in there was dressed like hardcore punk rockers or host club people. For some reason it felt a bit scary to browse their shops. But they were surprisingly friendly though, and urged us to try on whatever we touched. Some of them could converse in some basic English, others tried, and a few completely ignored us as soon as they found out we didn’t speak Japanese.
Max competitive
We bought jackets from different shops, and the interesting thing about this place is that they’ll walk you to the door before giving you your purchase. I’m guessing it’s to show rival brands that you bought something from their shop.
It’s so insanely competitive here that they even wanted to put the rival shop’s paper bag Chad was holding, into their own paper bag! According to Chad some of these brands are actual host clubs, so it’s adds to the competitiveness.
That was it for day 2. Satisfied with my new hoodie jacket. Hope it works :D
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I would say that they show you to the door of the shop is a gesture of politeness, like how you show your house visitors to the door. It happened to us when we bought the towels at Matsuyayaya-something department store, remember? Happened to me again, when i bought my bag. =) Service ++
Ah so that’s what it was all about. haha!
Japan has the best customer service in the world, real and fake, period.
It can also be to stop people from stealing, and also use the bag for free advertising on the street.
Imagine, you look real cool to others on the street and you are carrying a shopping bag with some particular brand name – people might check out that shop.
I have been following your journal for a while through another site related to HP! but never commented, so howdy. :-)
I might be going to Japan for a few days soon, so keep your pics coming! Nice work!
its not jet lag. it just feels like life in singapore is an illusion.
@fm – whoa thanks! you going for any H!P concerts while in japan? :D
at some moment in your pict. I thought the person in red is ur gf! :X
@bee – haha yea you’re the 3rd person to say that xD
i checked all the concert dates from that shop, it’ll be all finished when I do go, may be next time.