June 17--Free Day!!!

Today is our one full free day and there are a lot of choices of what to do. Some people are going to Kamakura, which is a town only about an hour away on the subway, some are getting up very early to visit Kyoto, some are headed to Mt. Fuji and I'm sure that there are many other plans in the works. I feel like I haven't seen enough of Tokyo itself, so I'm going to stay in the city.

Kim, Ellen and I first went to Harajyuku. It was the first time I'd done the subway in Tokyo and even though I'm pretty good with the subway in other cities, I was a little apprehensive. I needn't have worried! It was extremely easy and not too crowded. I had heard horror stories about how packed the cars could be, with white-gloved men pushing people into the trains to pack them as full as possible. But this is Saturday, so maybe that's why it wasn't too bad. One interesting note--there are certain cars reserved for women only until 9:30 a.m. on weekdays.

Our first stop was the Oriental Bazaar. I would highly recommend this store to everyone! It's got a lot of stuff and it's reasonably priced. If you're looking for sake sets, chopstick rests, bowls, plates, kimonos, obis, souvenirs galore--this is the place to go. Upstairs are independent vendors with various wares--antiques, woodblock prints, jewelry, etc. And it's a very nice, spacious store with helpful employees.

We had lunch at a nice little Italian place on a side street. It was a nice change from the Japanese food and the menu had English on it! A definite plus!

It was a very hot and humid day, but at least the sun was shining a bit--a first, I think! One thing that I noticed was that even though it was very hot, many Japanese people still seemed to be wearing long sleeves and even sweaters! Someone told me that it's because they don't want to get tan, but I don't know if that's true. We walked over to what seems to be the heart of the Harajyuku district and found the huge 100 yen store that we'd heard about. This one has about 5 floors, I think and it's fairly new. I bought a fan because of the heat and a couple of other little things. I'm sure that you could find all sorts of treasures at these stores, but I wasn't particularly in the mood to look through all the junk!

At the top of the street where we were in Harajyuku is a Japan Rail station. Each time a train pulled in, there was a surge of teenagers down the street. We saw some very interesting outfits! Since it was Saturday, it was very crowded. This street is full of cool, trendy shops. We wandered around a bit and also found some lovely jewelry stores and kimono shops--always fun to look!

We took the Japan Rail train to Shinjyuku, a big shopping area. We went to a large department store called Takashimaya. It's a very upscale, expensive store. In the same area was Tokyo Hands, which had a little bit of everything. I think by that point I was shopped out, so after a while, we went back to the hotel.

Ellen and I went to a restaurant near the hotel for dinner. We had seen the menu on a previous outing and they seemed to have several salads, so that's what we wanted. It was a dark place and we sat at a counter in front of a window where we could watch some of the food being prepared. The chef prepared several things on skewers--the most interesting was quail eggs! On the menu I saw that you could also order whale sashimi or chicken skin. Interesting choices, but we stuck with the salad, which was delicious! It had grilled veggies, some of which I couldn't identify, but they were great.