My alarm rings at 7:00am, slowly working our way into getting used to early mornings. We went out for a coffee back at Westside, as it’s close, cool, and made a good mocha. After finishing our drink, we take a walk through Asakusabushi over to Akihabara just to kill some time.
Although Asakusabushi is somewhat close to Tokyo’s core, it is less Urban then some of the other places near Tokyo station, like Chuo, Shinjuku, or our destination for the day; Shibuya, making it very nice to walk around without it feeling hectic like a city normally can. Once we get to Akihabara, we head to some more stores and look around for a bit until we decide to catch a train over to Shibuya. After some brief navigational miscalculations, we manage to get to Shinjuku to get a connecting train down to Shibuya.
Upon arriving at Shibuya, my friend does the first thing every tourist does when coming out of Shibuya station for the first time; take a picture / video of the Shibuya Crossing. Since Shibuya is a very busy station, the crossing is a six-way intersection, and all traffic is stopped for pedestrian crossing, it creates a sea of people whenever the crossing lights go green. After joining the hoard, we make our way down into the heart of one of Tokyo’s major shopping districts, stopping at a couple places before going to an underground store specializing in all things nerdy called The Mandarake.
Figures, old video games, movie posters, manga and more, it’s stocked full of all kinds of stuff, which unfortunately for tourists visiting who don’t know the language, is all still primarily in Japanese. After hours of wandering around the labyrinth of paraphernalia, I settle on some books to bring back and read before we take off to see some more stores.
We went to the Nintendo store next, which as you can imagine, is wall to wall goods from all of the major Nintendo franchises (aside from Pokémon, as it has its own stores). Mario, Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, and Pikmin merchandise with tons of people trying to find their favourite, it’s a lot of fun, albeit a little chaotic. After wandering around for a bit, I grabbed a souvenir to bring home and then left to go next door to the Shibuya Pokemon Store (yes, this is our third Pokémon store now). The entire store had a black and white colour scheme with flowing signs and designs on the wall, making it feel like an actual location in some of the games.
At this point, I feel like I’m good enough at navigating these stores to where I could stock them, but instead I hurry on and grab some more souvenirs for friends and check out. At this point, we’ve been walking around carrying bags of books and souvenirs for a while, so we begin to reverse engineer the route we took to get here, settling on 2 subway rides and a brief walk back to our hotel, where we go to sleep.
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