Japan Trip: Harajuku, Akihabara & Ueno

I'm going to lump Harajuku in with this post just because I don't have many pictures to go with it. Harajuku is famous for having oddly dressed people. It's mostly girls that dress in costume like attire and sadly there weren't much when we visited. I saw a handful but couldn't whip out my camera quick nor discretely enough. However, I did get pictures of one of the dishes I wanted to have while we were in Japan, called takoyaki. These are little balls of rice flour based batter wrapped around a chunk of tako (octopus). We weren't very hungry so we only ordered 4 of each kind and shared amongst myself, Justyn & Bri. Brianna ordered the traditional kind, I got the Mexican style one and Justyn had the ones topped with an omelet. Mine were so good I forgot to share one with Justyn. Woops!

Two of the places Justyn wanted to visit were Akihabara & Ueno. Akihabara is known for being an electronic centric place. I expected to be somewhat bored here but found that on top of having a bunch of electronics, they also had anime related things. We also killed a bunch of money and time at one of their many claw game arcades. Sadly we didn't win anything though. The claws were two pronged instead of three which made things more difficult. At this point during the trip, I was having major lower back issues. It was painful to even stand so I made us stop at Mister Donut for a snack and for me to rest a bit before going on. Both donuts were unlike any other donut we had had before. Justyn's chocolate donut was chewy.. almost like bread and mine tasted like strawberry Pocky. It kinda looked like the stuff that comes on Pocky too.

Our next stop was Ueno which is a motorcycle district. Most of the shops were closed but we still snapped a couple pictures of motorcycles. The third picture shows how space is precious. They even built, what we think is, housing under the freeway onramps.

For dinner we were pretty exhausted so we went to another Italian joint called Miami Garden. It was filled with teenage to mid 20s girls and guys. That should've been my first warning. It was probably my 2nd least favorite meal. Justyn enjoyed his pasta with bacon and cheese but my clam chowder was watery and tasted too much of butter. I mean look at it.. you can practically see the broken butter floating on top of it. For my entree I got a doria which is essentially rice topped with cheese. Boring.. *yawn*