Japan-night #2 in Tokyo

The next day when we woke up we went to this little café across from our hotel. It was really good actually, I got an egg sandwich and a waffle with whip cream. After breakfast we got all of our stuff together in the hotel and took the subway to another district in Tokyo (I want to say Rupungai, but I’m not completely sure) Anyways, it was such a cute area, there were cute little shops all over. We went there specifically to see Meiji Shrine, it’s a famous Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (Shinto is the main religion, along with Buddhism, of Japan). It was really cool, it was kind of cold though, I wasn’t dressed warm enough really, but I was fine. It was in the forest and there was a huge loop you could walk around. We walked a little less than a mile to get to near where the big part of the shrine was, and there buildings where people go to pray and such. It’s really hard to explain what it looked like, I have pictures, if I ever get the chance to post them. Oh, it was so cool this is a famous place for people to get married and we saw a Japanese bride..she looked so beautiful, and so young. I have pictures of her, it was really neat to see. Both the bride and grooms family was there, it was relatively small. Another thing REALLY funny, SOCKS WITH FLIP FLOPS, I got a kick out of it. It was really common for monks/religious figures and wedding parties to be wearing socks with flip flips. The flip flops are really funny too, they have a thicker heel and really thick thong part. I saw one monk with these like platform wodden ones, it’s so great. The whole wedding party was wearing socks with flip flops, I took like 4 pictures of it, its so funny, Linds pointed it out to me and we both were laughing so hard, it’s awesome. Anyways, when we were at the shrine it was so cute this Asian that looked around our age came up to us (with very broken English) and said he was from South Korea and asked us where we were from and we said the U.S, I think he just about died.. his eyes lit up and he was like “USA??? Can I please get a picture?” His friend took his picture with us and he was so thankful for the picture, he was so adorable. After we heard him talking to his friend and he kept saying U.S.A, it was so cute, it was obvious he had never seen an American before. I’m sure it’s going to be like that in some of the places I go to next. We walked around the shrine for a while and when we left we walked around the district and some of the shops, looking for a place to eat (it was past lunchtime and we were starving). We ended up going to this place that looked like it was good from far away, it was in the middle of this huge intersection on the second story of a building. We all just wanted to sit down so we just went there to eat, it turned out to be the Denny’s of Japan..it was called Jonathon’s (don’t go here if you’re ever in Japan). It was so awful, I couldn’t find anything I liked so I got French fries and I think Kalamari..it was like 2 side orders. Oh yeah, another weird thing Japanese people do..most restaurants, well a decent amount, have a button you can press so your server knows when to come over. We figured that out the hard way. There’s a huge language barrier with Japanese people (most don’t speak like any English).. we got really used to pointing at pictures on menus (almost all restaurants have pictures of the meals) Also, in the front of almost every restaurant they have plastic food of what their meals looks like, its seriously looks so gross and unappetizing. ANYWAYS, after our horrible meal at Jonathon’s we decided to look around at all the shops/stores on the street. We went to a ton of stores, they were all really cute, but pretty expensive. I didn’t really buy anything, I bought a pair of really cool shorts from this thrifty store—it was awesome. We also went to a forever21, hoping to find some cheap boots because we were freezing our toes off, we all ended up not finding any boots and we all bought some type of clothing. By the time we were done it was getting pretty late, probably around 7:30 or 8, so we took the subway back to our hotel and got ready for the night, I finally showered for the first time in like 2 days. When we were ready we went to dinner at this Chinese food type restaurant (we were desperate because a lot of places were closing because it was getting late), but it was actually really good. I got shrimp dumplings and this Cajun shrimp. The waiter was so cute, they ran out of the white wine we were drinking and he felt bad so he gave us a free bottle of a different white wine. In Japan you’re not supposed to tip, but we did at the end of this meal, like barely anything at all because we didn’t want to offend them, and we just told him to keep the change and he was soooo happy, he said thank you very much and was all smiley. He was young and it was obvious he had never gotten tipped before. After dinner we went back to the hotel for just a little bit to finish getting ready and grab a few things we forgot, then we took the subway to downtown Tokyo and went to this nightclub called Feira. It was really cool and it seemed really exculsive. We had to pay to get in, but it came with a free drink ticket. There were tons of SAS kids here because that’s where everyone was planning on meeting up. My friend Eric had his 21st birthday on the ship, so he got VIP to celebrate, and he let us come up there, it was really cool. There were tons of people from all over here, we met people from London, Russia, Brazil, and tons of Japanese people. Some of them were models I’m pretty sure, but we didn’t really talk to them, they were all in their own little group off on the side. We took a cab home late that night and when we woke up we went to Kyoto.