(I can’t believe I’m so far behind on the blog posts! Arghhh.)
On the 25th we got up at a reasonable hour and headed out to Kyoto station to head back to Tokyo – we took a different entrance so we stumbled upon a great food stall in the basement somewhere that had lots of onigiri (triangle-shaped rice with filling, wrapped in seaweed) and inari sushi (sweetened tofu sheet with rice inside). Yum yum. I wish I’d learned a little earlier in the trip to ask for konbu (kelp) onigiri!
(Vig enjoying an inari sushi.)
We took the shinkansen back to Tokyo, and even got to see Mt. Fuji from the window! We checked back into the same hotel we stayed in the first time – it was like coming home. Man, Tokyo was so awesome. After a little rest we decided to do one last sightseeing push for Tokyo – first up was Roppongi Hills, a pretty fancypantsy condo-entertainment complex with a movie theatre, a huge fancy mall, lots of restaurants and such.
And a huge spider sculpture.
To complete our upscale Roppongi experience we had a snack in a local coffee shop, Koots. They had great green tea, slightly weird vegetable-soy soup, and an even weirder cheese-and-olive onigiri!
Then it got a little darker and we headed to check out Harajuku – didn’t see too many dressed up people, but there was some good walking around and looking. Lots of crepe shops and clothing shops!
From Harajuku we walked along Omotesando street, which has all the designer stores. More fancy stuff! We looked for a restaurant listed online, but didn’t find it. Sort of desperate and hungry, we finally stumbled upon a treasure trove of vegetarian food – a Japanese health food store! I think it was called something like Nature House or something like that. They had a fair amount of prepared veggie Japanese foods in the store, and we picked up some nice oranges to snack on too. I think for food we got some stirfried veggies (beans! glorious green beans!), some salad, rice, and a tofu dish.
One more stop on our way back to the hotel to eat was the intersection at Shibuya station, which is a HUGE scramble intersection. Fun for photos, although a bit tough at night!
Back in our hotel we ate up our health food store dinner and packed up for the trip to Shanghai!
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