11/13/2010: "Travelblogue - Tokyo Day 5 (Asakusa, Kappabashi, Ueno, Kabuki-cho)"

Hmm... well, today was possibly a bit of bust. Not a bad day by any means, but really it felt like a little bit of a waste. We got up this morning without having planned out what exactly we were going to get up to today. We eventually decided that we should head up to Asakusa and see the Senso-ji temple and then walk over to Kappabashi (aka Kitchen Town) from there.

So really, you know, temples and shrines and stuff are cool and all, but I'm not really sure they're our bag. Senso-ji was large and pretty and impressive and all, but, um, I'm not Buddhist and there wasn't all that much to see. That and all the surrounding neighborhood is pretty much pure tourist... we really weren't all that into it. So after scarfing a taiyaki each (Lynnea's was chestnut, mine was purple sweet potato - delicious) and wandering around the temple and the shrine we set off for Kappabashi.

And then, well, Kappabashi was cool and all, but it's not like we could drag a bunch kitchen stuff back on the plane with us and those shops are tiny with incredibly narrow aisles and lots of breakable stuff, so, we pretty much only gave that a bit of skim. I think we got to Asakusa around 11 or 11:30 and including the rather lengthy walk and some lunch at one of the many Doutor locations, we were back at Ueno by a little after probably by 1:30 or 2.

Lynnea (oddly for her) still had the shopping bug so we went over to the ABAB department store and shopped around a bit there for clothes for her, but didn't find a ton of stuff. After that we came back to Shinjuku and hit a couple more of the big department stores in the area. That was kind of fun but not too inspiring. We grabbed dinner at some place that was really cheap and um, well, adequate. Not fantastic though.

The only other thing we did of interest was take a quick walk around Kabuki-cho. Kabuki-cho is one of Tokyo's more famous red light districts... this is not the reason I wanted to go there. The reason is that it's also the neighborhood that the neighborhood in the Yakuza series of games (aka Ryu ga Gotoku) is based on. And boy are they based on it. There are at least a couple streets there that the game had absolutely dead on. I actually felt like I had been there before. It was kind cool. There were, however, actual yakuza and such walking around, and it was getting kind of dark so we didn't walk around for more than about 10 minutes. Once we got back to the main street I noticed a huge ad for the next Ryu ga Gotoku game, which I found kind of amusing.

Anyway, that was about the day. Not bad in any way, but a little less exciting than the previous few days. Tomorrow it's back to Harajuku and Akiba to catch the famous fashionistas by Yoyogi park and the cosplayers respectively. Ought to f a fun, relatively low impact day, I think.