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Japan 2017

Japan 2017 Day 5: Tokyo Wanderings

Friday October 6, 2017

Today was another slow day but I was determined to show Leslie a bit of old Japan, so we headed to the Senso-ji temple in the Asakusa area of Tokyo which was fairly close to our hotel on the subway. We took some photos at the temple and then wandered around the gift stalls and small shops in the area before we decided to head off. I did manage to pick up a magnet with a mashup of the famous Great Wave of Kanagawa drawing but with Godzilla emerging from the wave.

From there we got back on the metro and headed to one of my places I really wanted to see – the Maru shop! Officially called Gallery Marusan, this shop is located near the Nezu Metro station in an area of Tokyo I had never been before. Its near Ueno (site of our first confusion transfer back in 2004) but on the other side of the park. I wanted to go there since I follow Maru on Instagram and we share a birthday. I was super stoked that we found the shop and the workers were happy to see us. We shopped in this small store for a while – I think I looked at every single item in the store more than once. My shopping in this store was very similar to how I shop in Flight 001 – another boutique store. I signed the guestbook and got a calendar as well as some stationary items. They gave us some Maru paw print souvenirs as well. I posed with the bike out front with the Maru pillow in the basket which I loved. The only thing that would have made it perfect would have been if Maru had wandered in the store. One day we will meet!

After Gallery Marusan, we headed towards Ikeburo. There was another Toys R Us in the mall there and Daniel wanted to look for some more Nintendo items. It was a bit of a slog from the metro station to the store. The store was located in a mall, but to get to the mall we had to pass through a couple of streets full of shops and restaurants that were similar to some of our favorite spots in the city. It reminded me of the USA where you can go to a completely different parts of a place like LA and see the same shops. Arriving at the mall, we realized it wasn’t just a small mall, but a huge one called Sunshine City and we had to figure out where in the mall the store was located. Honestly I am not sure how we found it, but we finally did (spoiler alert: it was much smaller than expected..).

Luckily, there was another Italian Tomato Cafe Jr to eat in and a wide variety of dessert options at the food halls. Once we completed shopping, we headed to the Tokyo Disney Resort. Daniel wanted to visit the Bon Voyage store so we could load up on souvenirs and not worry about carrying them when we visited the parks. Bon Voyage didn’t disappoint and we managed to get a good haul before heading back to the apartment.

As we arrived back in our apartment, we settled in fo a nice sleep. Mother nature wanted to make sure she welcomed us back to Japan and at 11:56pm we experienced a m5.2 earthquake. It was just a small jolt with some light shaking, but after some research we realized we missed the larger earthquake earlier in the day (a m6.2 at 4:59pm local time). For the rest of the night Leslie was stressed as smaller aftershocks continued, but eventually we fell asleep.