First Pass at Tokyo

Since I just got back from a long week vacation filled with temples and shrines, I wasnt ready to start sight seeing of traditional Japanese stuff just yet. But I decided to start tackling Tokyo's major city spots.

I started with Shibuya. Shibuya is this one of the many GIANT shopping/nightlife areas that contains tons of department stores, restaurants and the world's busiest Starbucks. It also contains one of Tokyo's busiest nightlifes. It remains busy until the last train at midnight everyday. It was actually kinda difficult to shop for men's clothing. In all the department stores Ive been to, there are like 6 floors of women's wear and 1 of men's. I'm not complaining cause I'm not a big fan of shopping and I cant afford the department store stuff anyways. It also has a huge HMV with different floors devoted to different genres of music. There were actually a classical music floor and a jazz music floor. It was quite exciting to find a floor devoted to my all time fav music genre. I spent almost an hour there just sampling and listening to Japanese-made jazz music.

Shibuya

Festival passing by the streets in Shibuya
A shot of the Shibuya main intersection from the worlds busiest Starbucks

So during Ana's birthday, I took Ana out to a restaurant in Shibuya called Alcatraz (named after the famous high-security prison in San Francisco) located in some basement. The elevator down was uniquely designed like the Tower of Terror in Disney World. It was a very Halloweenish restaurant. Its basically this jail and evil/mad/psycho-doctor themed restaurant where when you enter, the hostess and the waitresses, dressed as nurses, handcuffs you and leads you to your jailcell. Throughout our meal they put on many acts, like mad doctors running around, sirens, speakers broadcasting creepy messages, etc... At one point this mad doctor with a clownmask came running toward our table with two dildos in his hands. It startled Ana.. hahahaha. The food was kinda questionable.. warm caesar salad made of cabbage??? hmmmm... yeah... In reality, only the Japanese could do such perky restaurants like this.

Alcatraz theme restaurant for Ana's birthday

During the last weekend I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art where there was an Egyptian exibition that was brought over from the L'ouvre in Paris. The exibition was in French and Japanese so I had to rely on my French to actually understand stuff. hahahaha. But overall it wasnt too exciting cause we see a lot of this stuff in museums in Canada so it doesnt wow me at all.. The Japanese seemed to be wowed and amaze with it... well they get wowed by a lot of things.. hahahaah. I went to other parts of the museum with neat paintings and sculptures. I really enjoyed it. But sadly I got sick by the time I left. I felt a cold coming on.

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art