Day 27 - Ginza

As the forecast for today said, it was bright and sunny! With that in mind the bunch of us couldn't decide on a place to go. 'Go somewhere we'd like to revisit?, or visit someplace new on such a nice day?' we thought. Of course I'm geared to go to new places as though I'm on auto-pilot so I suggested why not anywhere new, no matter where and which line. Joy had the great suggestion of catching any train and exiting where we thought the city looked robust of life.

On the trains we decided to play a dumb standing game to see who'd be the first who needs to take a step in order to balance themselves. There were five of us standing parallel to the windows and we rode the train with the feeling of being on a surfboard/snowboard. That got boring quickly, so we made it so we are facing either the front or back of the train. Okay, of course the other four are facing the front of the train so I decided to face the back so I could watch everyone play. When the train hit the last stop at Shinjuku, all but two of us had lost by taking a step in order not to fall.

Once in Shinjuku, we killed a few minutes while Ashly decided what she wanted to do with herself, stay out a bit longer, or return home when she knows she'll have guests an hour from then. When she did decide, the rest of us had decided by then that we all haven't been to Ginza this trip yet so we'd catch the train to visit.

t was such a beautiful city when we exited the station; there were tall buildings everywhere - luxurious stores filling the streets like I've only seen once before in New York. It seemed like every store we passed was more expensive than we could afford so we mainly walked around. There was a particularly large book store that we walked into, where everyone bought either manga (comic book) or a magazine. I was particularly interested in the cooking books, because the food looked so easy to make (despite being written in Japanese) and delicious -- but I'll buy one the next time I'm in a book store if I really want one.

There was also this giant toy store where we spent an hour or so walking through finding all sorts of little things we'd like to buy. Nami has this little dress doll thing that she's been buying these tiny clothes for, but keeps getting the same type each time. She asked me to pick one for her, so instead I bought it for her. In exchange, she picked out these little prize-box panda toys that I said I'd be happy with and so she bought them. She took extraordinarily long in the store after we had already been waiting to leave for a while. Later tonight I found out the reason why she took so long was because she bought me a baby Stitch stuffed animal. Thank you Nami! :D

After the toy store we were all quite hungry so the search for a restaurant began again. We thought the prices in the main area of the city were just too high for what seemed to be tiny portions, so we were debating if we should eat back at home or not. It then occurred to me that if we steered off the main strip that there must be smaller, cheaper restaurants around. So we did just that and wound up at a place called 'Watami'.

Watami was designed like any other Izakaya (bar) with a restaurant filled with smoke, beers clanging all around, and menus with various, small interesting-looking dishes for cheap prices. As a small group we figured if we purchased a bunch of dishes, we'd be able to try each of them -- so we ordered about 7 different dishes or so including German potatoes, okonomiyaki, fried fish, yakisoba, and others.

After paying for a total inexpensive bill of 2,400yen we began our search for a dessert shop nearby. We must have walked for what seemed like 20~30min easily, and wound up in no-man's land. Instead of thinking, "well it's a lost cause, let's turn back" we thought, "I don't want to walk all the way back, let's just keep walking" and wound up far, far from the original station we came out of. It's okay though, we still had around two hours left before the trains would stop, so we were able to find a station in time. Surprisingly though, when we were about to catch our trains, we noticed we couldn't find the train we caught to get to Ginza. Instead, we found a train more familiar to us, the Yamanote.

Interestingly enough, we had walked so far from Ginza we ended up in Tokyo City, the last stop of the Yamanote line. By the time we reached home it was just past 11pm and the time to 'study' Japanese began~