This hotel is the first one that includes breakfast, but it is also the lowest quality hotel on our trip, so that also means the breakfast isn’t massive, but it’s better than nothing and it saves us a trip in the morning.
The buffet included some small rolls, custard strudels, some cereals, yogurt and scrambled eggs.
After breakfast we headed to Shibuya. About half of our group are keen on shopping, so we ended up agreeing that we would spend most of the day there. Jono, Rob and I started going from shop to shop. Jonathan loves shopping, but Rob and I.. not so much. I think we started getting a little bit delirious with all the shops, so our comments and terrible jokes started going down hill, so much so that Jono asked us to leave him alone for a while!
Rob and I continued around Shibuya for a little while before meeting up with Jono again for lunch. In that time we ended up going to the Disney store for a bit of a laugh and to check for DisneySea tickets, which they sold there for about $65 for a single day pass.
After a bit more walking around, we went to get a photo with Hachiko, the famous dog statue in Shibuya and we found a tourist map of Shibuya to study until we met up with Jono again.
We met up with Jono and started looking for somewhere to have lunch. The tourist map said there was a little alley way with some traditional looking restaurants, known as “Nonbei Yokocho”, so we tried to find that. Off the main street, there was a little alley way with some older looking shops, but it was quite small and right next to the tracks. Everything was closed, but then Rob saw a really small gap between two of the shops and when we went through that, there was another alley way (an alley way inside an alley way) that had more traditional restaurants. It looked really cool, it was like a really small version of Hardware Lane in Melbourne - except everything was closed there too.
We moved on to find somewhere to eat and ended up at a Japanese fast food place. I got a meal set for less than $5 that included grilled pork, coleslaw, rice and miso soup.
From there we followed Jono for a bit longer to do some more shopping and then met up with the others. Our meeting place was the famous Starbucks above the busy intersection. We ordered a drink and snack, waited for some seats to become available and watched the intersection in action for a little while.
It’s pretty mesmerizing, as the traffic is going trough the intersection, the number of pedestrians on the side walk waiting to cross slowly build up and then the lights change, the traffic stops and people from every side move into the intersection travelling in every direction.
After that we went back to the Disney store to buy our DisneySea tickets and then made our way to Don Quixote, which is like a multi level reject shop, that sell everything! To give some examples, some of the items include: food, tools, clothes, toys, sporting goods, pet food and accessories, office equipment, underwear, costumes (both kids and adult), games, BB guns, fireworks, porn, watches, kitchen and electrical items, shavers, fans, crockery, makeup and bedding! …It’s really quite amazing!
From there we headed back towards to the hotel and went for a walk through Akihabara to find some dinner. Rob and Sarah didn’t want Japanese food, and Rob F and Jono didn’t want western food, so we split up. We ended up looking at a few different places, but they were well over priced. We ended up getting some discount vouchers from some street salesmen and found a very popular Japanese restaurant that looked pretty good. Their menu had a few weird items on it, like fried gizzards, pig ears and raw horse meat, but amongst the weirdness there were a few good ones and it was a lot cheaper than the other restaurants in the building.
I ordered some Salmon sashimi, a cheese filled rissole, a really tasty fillet of Mackerel and a drink all for less than $10.
