We woke up at reasonable time and made our way to get some breakfast, it was still a bit wet outside, but rather humid/hot still, so I packed the dinky umbrella I bought at Shinjuku rather than my hoodie. On the way to the train station, we grabbed some breakfast at the local Mini Mart, I had this weird sausage and egg bun thing! The bun was quite sweet/buttery, kind of tasted like a croissant... was quite nice, even if it did look rubbish!
We arrived at Shibuya armed to the teeth with various things to do, this went down the pan quickly! One wrong turn led to another, and we ended up in a place which could only be described as "lovers hill" basically it's a group of themed hotels where you pay like 5,000 yen (£40) to "stay" there for a couple of hours... Needless to say I didn't stick around!
Didn't take long to get back on track, we were looking for a few flagship stores and the statue of Hachiko, who is known as faithful dog, at this spot he waited for his master to return many years after he had passed away, kinda reminds me of that episode of Jurassic Bark! This statue is suppose to be the central meeting point for people in Shibuya... and could we find it? Could we hell! It seems that we walked past the general vicinity twice as well!
The day was slowly turning into a right mess, as we originally anticipated to go to Shibuya and then venture to Harajuku to see the "trendy" crap, as pimped off in all the guide books! In the end it was mutually agreed that we'd return for what we missed at Harajuku for another day!
Anyway, we found the Mandarake store in Shibuya eventually, that was filled with loads of retro and nostalgic memories, I picked up a couple Tales of Vesperia gashapon for a reasonable price, may return to pick up the other 2 I saw there. We found a few video game shops, I picked up "Ni no Kuni" on the Nintendo DS (Big box version) for around 1,500yen, seemed like a good price. A lot of the other stores seemed far too expensive to even contemplate a purchase from.
Rather than let the day go to waste, we decided to try out a Japanese cinema, we managed to get to a cinema showing Harry Potter in English (Japanese Subs) so we decided to see that, only £18/2,200yen per person! And we think we have it bad in the UK! There is nothing crazier than the adverts at a Japanese Cinema, some of them were just insane! the trailers, the adverts and the "no smoking, no talking on mobiles or dancing" message was just amazing!
We left the film with mixed feelings (No spoilers but what the hell!?) And made our way back, the film finished around 9.30pm, Shibuya crossing was lit up, but not to the extent of what it's famous for, ala Lost in Translation, I guess that's because of the national power saving initiatives in order to save power as a result of the Earthquake that happened in March. It's easy for me to be selfish and worry about what I want to see, rather than considering the greater sacrifice.
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