Australia to Japan via Eastern Europe Part 4 - Day 2 Tokyo...

We both woke up at some ungodly hour (probably suffering from jet lag or something). I tried to make the best out of a bad situation by playing some of the Drum PSP game I had bought yesterday. Most of the songs are of the J-Pop variety but there was "We Will Rock You" by Queen and "Slave 4 U" by Britney and a couple of other Nutcracker Suite songs as well to bash the hell out of the PSP with. The game has all of these weird dancing dog things at the bottom of the screen - who seem to go into convulsions when you do better - perhaps they are suffering from brain damage from all of the bad J-Pop music or something.... WTFIWWTJ!!!

I'm on a shaving strike this holiday. I want to see if I can grow a beard - if only to prove to Ant that I've gone thru puberty. Anyway - Justin Timberlake sort of has a beard at the moment - so it must be kewl...

Outside the hotel - and it is pishing down. The weather is also pishing down on our plan to go to Nikku (a town outside of Tokyo) so we are thinking that we should do something a bit more indoors than walking around temples.

Ant couldn't resist the smell of the Mister Donut donuts as we walked past the store close to our hotel - so we had Mister Donut for breakfast. I had ordered one "Krispy Kreme" style glazed donut and a weird shrimp pastry thingy which the chick heated up for me... It wasn't too bad - although it wasn't very breakfasty in a Western sort of way. Ant went for some calorific jam donut thing. We both opted not to have the green tea flavour donut - that would be morally wrong.

We caught a train to Ryobuku to go to the Edo/Tokyo Museum. Although it was probably 500m away from where we were - we didn't have a map and thought catching 3 different trains would be better.

The Edo/Tokyo Museum was a bit of a (dare I say it) late 80's funky architecture. Think the Belconnen Mall/Paris Contempory Art Gallery bastard love child and you might be close. The museum itself was sort of like the hokey Oriental Pearl Tower Museum in Shanghai (see our trip to China for more details) but on a bigger budget. It was interesting to learn that Japanese women used to give birth whilst sitting on a seat. It was also good to see that the "Japanese WWII Ignorance Thing" is still alive and well as the details of WWII on Tokyo was a "hazy" to put it politely.

We made (subway) tracks to Roppongi Hills (see our trip to Japan from last year for more details on "the Hills" in the blog). There was this Japanese version of Vicky Pollard doing interpretive dance art outside the Roppongi Hills shopping center.... as you do. Ant and I were going to check out the Art Museum at Roppongi but it was a bit expensive (almost $20AUD) and the current exhibit seemed to be a bit daft ("laughter in Japanese Art")...

We did a quick check of the TV Ashsi building where we couldn't see any sign of Matthew's TV Hits on the TV Schedule. However - they had some doozies including the "Medical Horror Check Show" which more than made up Matthew's absence. The TV Ashsi building had a big set and display on the Melbourne World Swimming Championships which was showing off the two Japanese swimmers who had taken bronze in doggy-paddle or something.

We had lunch at (you guessed it) Yoshinoya - that haven for depressed looking single Japanese business men. I mimed a "cracking open an egg" to the chick and she gave me a raw egg to put in my beef bowl... sweet!@

There were all these guys with signs everywhere pointing to "Tokyo Midtown" so we decided to follow them to check out what all the fuss was about. It turned out to be "Tokyo Midtown's" grand openning. It was like the Canberra Airport Brand Depot openning - only bigger... Tokyo Midtown was sort of like a big new urban development (think Roppongi Hills but a couple of years newer). There was a huge Japanese moshpit to get into the shops there - but our highlight was a gucci pet store where you could pay $50AUD to get your dog's hair cut, or you could buy some gucci multi-vitamins for your dog or some gucci dog chocolates... WTFIWWTJ... Gucci dog multi-vitamins - now I've seen everything...

We caught the train to Shinjuku - the sort of CBD of Tokyo (if you like). Ant was planning on going to the biggest shopping mall of Shinjuku - but it was all under construction and had mosh pit queues to get in... so we blew off that idea and headed on foot to Harajuku (the cool place).

We stumbled across a "Design T-Shirt" place where I picked up a pink pirate T shirt and a Gorilla driving a tank whilst saying "ZZZ!" t-shirt (only in Japan can you get completely non-sensical t-shirts).

We wandered around the "less-touristy" but "more-edgier" side streets of Harajuku. It was full of cool botique clothes shops and the like - including the not-so-cool "Freak Store Outlet" which was very much in the nerdy asian style of clothing. Ant went a bit crazy at a "Abrecombie and Fitch" shop. For those not in the know A&F is a bit of a gay craze - not that the clothes are that good - rather the preppy models that they use in the advertising is the reason behind the cult following. Ant is a follower of the A&F cult and I've booked him into the Betty Ford Clinic for a de-program session. Anyhow - the A&F store in Harajuku was a "no-brands" shop - selling legit stuff but just getting rid of the label in the item. According to a sign out the front - they use "pros" to find and collect the merchandise. I didn't know "pro's" are fashion experts?!

Also of note in Harajuku was the "I (Skull-bones) Fu#k" t-shirt. Maybe I could understand a "I heart Fu#k" t-shirt - but what does skull bones got to do with f###ing??

We wandered down to Shibuya (another youth orientated centre) and both Ant and I went a little crazy in the huge Tower Records store there. I also bought a "Monkey holding gun saying let's get ready to rumble!" t-shirt from Parco, a Japanese department store... as you do...

For dinner - we both had "Japanese curry" on our mind - a sort of weird fried chicken with curry sauce and rice sort of affair. After passing over a couple of "real curry" restaurants of the Indian variety - we found a cool ticket restaurant which costed us about $5AUD for a curry and a beer...