Days 4 and 5

So, I went to Shibuya and was slightly disappointed in the scale. It looks ALOT bigger in films. The city was still really cool, but my expectations were not met. Other than that pretty awesome place. Lots of shops selling the newest, most popular fad items, a metric shit-ton of music stores. We went to Tower Records, HMV, Disk Union, Book Off, and a few others I can't remember the names of. Overall a very stylish place to go.



The next we took a daytrip to Kyoto, and then to Osaka so's I could go to Shocker!, Japanese punk band Balzac's store. Kyoto reminded me of downtown L.A. Alot of very shiny, very tall office buildings. Unlike L.A. there were pachinko parlors in between most of them. Saw Kyoto Tower, nothing special. Really. Bought a statue of a tanuki, which the sales lady tried to wrap, which they often do in Japan, (almost every individual item) and TORE THE PAPER!!! She was very apologetic, "Gomenasai, gomenasai..." I told her, "Daijobu. Daijobu desu." Luckily she let it drop, it took her about 10 minutes to get as far as she did. We then headed of to Osaka. I didn't really see much of Osaka because we had a really fun time just trying to find Shocker!. We asked a cop, and he told Michiko, my friend Joe's mother, how to get there.......and she promptly forgot. So we hailed a cab, and the cab driver promptly drove IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. FOR 15 MINUTES. Needless to say he only charged us for half of the trip. We got close to the shop, asked another cop directions (apparently that's all cops do in Japan, give directions) walked a few minutes, asked a random pedestrian, and finally found the joint. Very cool, very small shop. I wished I had more money. Then we got on the subway, and back to the Shinkansen.

The Shinkansen is the famous "bullet train", and it is fast. Really fast. Sometimes sounds like you are on a plane fast. Very comfortable ride, they even have someone walk a cart down the aisle with refreshments every 20 minutes or so. It was around a 7 hour round trip from Osaka to Tokyo. So that was pretty much the entire day.