We thought that we’d get up early and immediately today, but instead we had one of the worst nights of sleep ever. Seems that last night was a free pass due to the sleep deprivation. Today was the real struggle - no more such free ticket. I woke up a ton of times during the night and I constantly felt like I was half-awake.
After hours of such agony, I finally managed to properly fall asleep, and woke up around 9:30 am. It was raining, and man, it is really a vibe in Tokyo. Laying in bed and listening to quiet rain was pretty nice.
We ate the snacks we bought yesterday - I got sausages and dried squid. It’s a bit of an interesting thing, in Ukraine we also have dried squid as a pretty common snack, even though it doesn’t seem like something that would fit into the culture. I’m not exactly sure where it comes from. I bought it here to compare, and it’s way less salty and a more vinegary and flavory here. Decent, but definitely a taste to get used to.
It rained for the first half of the day, and I had to be careful to protect the camera from the rain. The smell of trees that smell like █████████████ was here as always. We met █████████████ and crossed the rail tracks to go to the Meiji Jingu, which was very close to our hotel.
I thought that visiting this during the rain is pretty much perfect. It just wouldn’t look at good during a sunny day, and the crowds would be much worse too.
We got out of the park and walked a bit, and ended up in Harujuku. The Takeshita street was absolutely hell during the rain. I felt like the umbrellas limited the capacity of the street, although I’m not sure if it’d be any better during the sunny weather. Regardless, we passed it as quickly as we could without stopping.
We went to a sushi place, that my friend said is the biggest sushi chain in the world. It’s pretty cool, you just order food on the screen and it automatically comes to you with a escalator thingy. Also the menu was Honkai Star Rail themed, which was also pretty cool, even though I don’t like gachas.
The food was good. Sushi are still better in Ukraine tho. I tried Matcha for the first time here, and my friend said it was very strong, but I ended up having to top it up like 5 times before I could start feeling the flavor. I don’t think I added enough still, because it didn’t taste like grass. It was ok.
We visited KiddyLand for some reason. Wasn’t interesting to me, I wasn’t fan of any of the titles there.
We then went from Shinjuku to Shibuya. Shibuya is so filled with people… Ofc we went to the crossing, but it wasn’t that interesting. I actually wasn’t even sure we were there until I asked my friend.
We also saw the iconic screen, but once again, it wasn’t that interesting to be honest. And there was too many people around to enjoy it.
Afterwards we went to the Fangamer store:
It was a bit disappointing. The staff took a long time to come and some things were oddly priced. I wanted to buy a sticker but then I saw that it actually costed as much as slippers. I did end up buying slippers and socks tho.
I was forcefully… brought to the Nintendo store by my friends. It was hell, probably the worst place in Japan I’ve been so far. SO PACKED. I never liked any Nintendo stuff in the first place, so I just wanted to get out as fast as possible. I’m kinda glad that we went into that building though, because we ended up going to the rooftop, which had a little park, a cafe and incredible views. We got coffee and rested there for a while. The atmosphere was so rich and nice.
The weather cleared up while we sat there. It became really windy, and clouds moved super fast. Once we were done, we went to a small spot that we’ve seen just before, and I think that ended up being my favorite place today.
My god, I would love to just come to this place and rest all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful city view before. I really enjoyed the industrial rooftops of the skyscrapers.
We went to the Tower Records, which is apparently the biggest music store in the world. There was a lot of really cool stuff I recognized, but I had a bit of a dilemma - I’m not gonna buy stuff I don’t know, and I don’t see the point of buying stuff I already love, given that I listened to it a billion times already. Not to mention that I don’t even have a CD or a vinyl player…
Le sigh. Made me feel like I’m missing out, maybe once I have a more stable place to live in I’ll be able to start collecting physical music.
We went to a Yakiniku restaurant afterwards. I really enjoyed the atmosphere there, really felt very local. Thank god we had a person that could converse a little bit in Japanese. I wanted to take some photos of the place itself, but it would be impossible without violating privacy of others.
We ordered a ton of meat, and also drank for the first time in Japan. Drunkness is too fun, it’s scary.
After that we went to the Animate store. We went through so many floors without finding anything interesting, but just before we left I saw Madoka and Homura tea… flavors… I immediately went and bought them both.
We wanted to go to billiards and drink some more, but it was packed. So ███████████████████ ended up playing the rhythm game for a bit, and then we headed back to our hotels.
A bit disappointing, but I didn’t really manage to take any good night photos. I still have time to do that though.
