Day 5: Harajuku, Meiji Shrine, Tokyu Hands

We have done a lot of talking about scary things we have found and strange Japanese versions of western food we have eaten but we haven't talked much about the delicious Japanese food we have eaten. So let me do that a bit before I go back to the weird stuff! Last night we went out for okonomiyaki, which is usually described as Japanese pancakes or Japanese pizza. It isn't really like either of those. You basically start out with a batter made with Japanese mountain yam, which gets a kind of gluey texture when grated so it's kind of thick and sticky. Then you add meat and vegetables and sometimes noodles, depending on where you are. My okonomiyaki had green onion, egg, and little bits of crunchy tempura batter and Philip ordered one with pickled ginger, meat, egg,  tempura batter and chopped cabbage. You mix all your fillings into the batter and cook it into a circle shape on the griddle built into your table. When it is finished cooking, brush okonomiyaki sauce on top and add some powdered seaweed if you like. It was a delicious supper and Philip liked it despite the awful introduction he got to the dish at Heritage Days the summer before last.


Now back to scary things we saw while walking down the street:
This was the menu sign for a restaurant we passed on our way to the okonomiyaki restaurant. It caught my eye because it mentioned horse sashimi, then we noticed the unorthodox caesar salad, and then we saw CHICKEN SASHIMI. This would be why we found a tv show about cooking chicken completely so you don't kill your grandchildren. 
 







After dinner we found this warning-laden can of Pepsi and despite not knowing what we were supposed to be wary of, we drank it to find out what was different about it. We correctly guessed it had extra caffeine, couldn't tell there was anything else different. Apparently all the warnings were to tell you that it contained Extreme Carbonation and you should be very careful while opening it. We managed not to kill ourselves with it somehow.



One of the other Japanese meals we had involved buying a ticket from this vending machine and taking it inside to the staff who made us delicious tempura and ramen for breakfast. In the time it took us to decide what we wanted, a man bought a ticket, got his food and ate it. Japanese people eat REALLY fast. 



Outside of Shibuya station is a statue of a dog named Hachiko. A professor from a university in Tokyo would go to this station every morning to go to work and his his dog would walk him to the station and then head home for the day before returning in the evening when the professor was coming home. When the professor died, Hachiko still went to the station every evening and waited until the last train had left for the night for the next seven years until he died too. A statue was built in the 1920s to honor the dog's loyalty but was melted down for metal in WWII. The current statue was built after the war ended.



Another random statue outside Shibuya station. It doesn't have a heart-wrenching story behind it.



We spent a good chunk of the day in this giant craft/hobby/do it yourself store. It kind of had everything you could think of, including vacuum tube radio kits and a frying pan that would put your measly six-chicken frying pan to shame.   







We have no idea on this one.



I got my Fondue Burger today! It was pretty much just a McChicken dunked in cheese sauce with bacon and a slice of swiss-y cheese but I would have been upset forever if I had missed out on this one.





Harajuku is kind of the area where all the cool kids go to shop for clothes and it was super packed. We wanted to go on Sunday, when everyone comes down dressed in their craziest outfits for the tourists to take pictures but we were glad we came on the supposedly less busy Monday afternoon.



We found a bunch of real estate listings posted in one shop. This "mansion" is a whopping 445 square feet.



The weird vending machine find of the day is another corn soup. Apparently this is such a popular idea that multiple companies are trying to capture the warm can of corn soup market. 



It seems that anyone who is anyone in Japan has an armband to show their supreme officialness. This includes subway guards, men who watch over construction sites so you don't get too close to anything dangerous, people who work in information booths near tourist areas, and this guy, who was making sure people made orderly lines to get tickets to a noh performance that was happening at the Meiji Shrine later in the evening. From the look on his face, it has been his life's dream to secure a job that involved wearing an armband.  



The path approaching the shrine was really impressive, unfortunately when we got to the shrine itself, it was full of folding chairs for the people who would see the play later on in the evening. There was something really cool looking going on in the back of the temple and a priest was playing a giant taiko drum but a man with an armband told us we couldn't take a picture, so we don't have one for you  guys, sorry. We didn't want to risk his wrath.









Tomorrow we are traveling to Kyoto by bullet train, very exciting! Our hotel room will almost be as big as that apartment listing... I hope we don't get charged extra because it's such a huuuge mansion!