Tokyo - Day 4 - Shopping therapy for rainy days
Going into the trip rain was predicted almost every day. Luckily the previous four days were completely rain free. It had to arrive some time, though. Today brought moderately heavy rain for most of the day with a mist filling in the gaps between showers.
What do you do when rain strikes down on you? Head to modern climate controlled enclosures: shopping malls. After purchasing our train tickets for our excursion to the south, we hit up another shopping district: Shibuya. We bounced around a couple of malls and sat for a few minutes at a Starbucks perched above the pavement watching the ballet of umbrella toting pedestrians in the large five way intersection below. After scrambling through that mess a few times I finally understand why transparent umbrellas are so popular here. Visibility is important in such crowds!
After our coffee we hit up one last shopping mall called Shibuya 109. This was apparently the popular mall with the youth. Here Winnie made her first real purchase. She bought a pair of shoes. I mostly people watched and tried not to laugh as the school girls dished out money at the cell phone beauty parlor.
Burnt out on fashion malls we took a quick breather to dry out at home base and headed off again to the nearby electronics district of Akiabara. Exploring another part of the district turned up store after store crammed with figurines and dolls of anime characters. We even found a half dozen maid cafes and three stores devoted to (expensive) manufactured cosplay costumes. During this exploration we also made a breakthrough: we successfully found not one, but two businesses based on their street addresses.
As the night cooled down we grabbed a couple of rice bun hamburgers at Mos Burger and headed again to the hotel. We had planned to spend a few minutes playing pachinko, but Winnie passed out again aborting such plans.
With this day over, our biggest chunk of time in Tokyo has passed. We will be heading out of town for the weekend to visit Winnie's cousin Amy and following that up with a couple day trips to nearby cities. A couple more days bumming around Tokyo and that'll be it!
Anyway, time for me to crash.