Japan + Hong Kong Trip Summary
OKAY SO. I finally went to Japans! My dad had promised he’d take me on a business trip to Japan with him if I did well on my SATs and stuff, and I did (not as well as I’d like, but...)! I really hadn’t believed he’d keep his word, ha. He also had to stop by at hong kong for some other meetings afterwards, too. It was fun but I really missed my kittens ;3;\
Saki was in Tokyo at the same time and I emailed her my Japan cell phone number BUT SHE DIDNT CALL ME LOLZ. SAKI.
SAKI I'M STALKING YOU.
There were no good movies to watch on the plane ride to Tokyo D: I ended up watching Shrek 3~I love Antonio Ba-I mean Puss in Boots ;3; There were japanese subtitles, and they call him “cat that has put on boots”. Lolz
even though we were in exec class (thanks to my dad’s company) the food was gross, it was just dressed up to look pretty. And it is SO dry on planes, I hate it, I couldn’t breathe and I was constantly using nosespray ew ew D: I couldn’t sleep..I just played pokemans and then I watched Toki o Kakeru Shojo and tried not to BAWWW at the end uuu it was so sad D: D: nhhhh
So when we finally got there, we rode from narita airport to tokyo on a bus. We arrived at the Imperial Hotel at like 9 pm. The Imperial Hotel is pretty famous, I think-it’s in Ginza and the original building was by Frank Lloyd Wright and it looked cool but then they demolished it and put up a boring, earthquake-proof building. :< Anyway its friggin huge and it has like 8 restaurants in it, plus a ton of shops. Japan is pretty much made out of shops. Its just one huge shopping mall.
We had a traditional Japanese breakfast the next morning. It was okay. I found the rice gruel kinda gross. My dad said we should try the rice gruel, since he had had good rice gruel before, but there it was tasteless and mushy, ew. You’re supposed to put in some of the stuff they give you in little bowls, which was mostly japanese pickles, including those scary picked cherries... There was some stuff that looked like radish shavings, and I ate that in the gruel, and then I realized like a day later that they were tiny baby eels. Hur- The fish was cooked nicely though, and the miso soup was good too, I love miso soup ;3;
After breakfast we went to harajuku and that’s when I discovered IT WAS EXTREMELY BOILING HOT. Eggs were frying on the sidewalks, makeup was melting, everyone was carrying those round fans and I was gross and sweaty after standing outside for only like 3 minutes. But I had a mission! A shopping mission! So, yeah. I was blinded by the beauty of it all, for sure. First we went to closet child, and of course my dad had to stand outside because the gayness of that store can cause mental retardation in those who have weak gay immune systems. Brand dresses everywhere! Heaven! Of course most of them were too small for me, but shut up. I like to caress them. And the ones that might have fit me I couldn’t buy, because there was no try on room ! of course! It was pretty crowded, considering how tiny that room was. There were a few lolita girls there, and of course they looked fabulous even though it was 100 degrees outside. One was wearing this gorgeous floral scallop-bottom Angelic Pretty onepiece, but the fabric looked really thick, plus she was wearing a blouse, bloomers, a petticoat and kneesocks! And she didn’t look hot at all!
Ahhh and not only do these girls not sweat, they are also incredibly skinny. Asia!! I hadn’t realized how small they are there. Before I felt bad because I couldn’t fit into most brand dresses, but now I know why, I mean, their bone structure is much smaller than mine, and they’re much shorter than me (but ok, I still feel bad). No matter how much weight I lose, I could never be their size... But yeah, obviously I felt extra self conscious there, around all those toothpick-girls. Sigh.
I shouldn’t forget to mention that in closet child, they were playing this insane Japanese-version Disney songs album or something, I don’t even know. It was like, the three little pigs song in Japanese with dialogue and stuff, and then some princess song and by then I got out of there because it was terrifying. I bought a shirred btssb blouse, a pink plastic btssb bow, and some cellphone stickers, but when we got back to the hotel it was gone! I have no clue how we lost it, but I am SO friggin pissed off because that blouse was hella expensive. Maybe my dad dropped it? Fuck..
Anyway, after closet child we walked down that harajuku street of crazy...you know the one, takeshita? There are tons of awesome shops there--mostly punk, but I like looking at them. I found this 80's pop/spank! style shop called ACDC rags. Oh gawd oh gawd it was the best. They had lots of clothes in these adorable patterns, bows and unicorns and poodles and kittens omgggg *w* And of course frilly tutu miniskirts. I bought an oversized sweater and a little backpack~
Then we went to Innocent World~ which wasn’t in the Laforet with the other lolita shops, for some reason. Its above a furniture store called A-Titty?! Oh, japan. The Innocent World shop is really lovely!! It has two changing rooms, wao! @w@ So many wonderful dresses~ I tried on this dress, but it was too small in the bust (as usual), and besides I already have a similar one.
I ended up getting a ring I had been eyeing for a long time. Since i'm retarded, I bought it before trying it on and afterwards I realized that its too small, but...I force it on anyway....;3;
Okay then we finally went to the laforet. IT WAS ABSOLUTE HEAVEN. HOLY CRAP. I was like, not breathing and when I get really excited my face goes blank and I was just like dskjfhdkjsdkjfh yessssssss peeing
I mostly just looked at the lolita stores, but all the other stores were awesome cool too. The Angelic Pretty store was the best it was a PINK WONDERLAND OF GAY WONDER!! And the girls working there were like living art they were so awesome fjghfjg my loli role modelssss~
I asked to try on two cutsews, but I couldn’t understand the girl’s super-polite response, and then she just went ahead and rung up my items, and I was like AHHH NOO! But I didn’t know how to say “wait if I don’t know if they’ll fit I don’t want to buy them” so I bought them. Luckily, it turns out that they fit...okay, they’re a little tight around the chest again but I DON’T CARE, THEY’RE CUTE.
Alice and the Pirates was also great, so much kirakira jewelry *w* but the Swimmer store was the most kirakira~ They have the cutest crap ever, like a scale shaped like a wrapped bon-bon (okay, a little cruel maybe).
(several artists were painting murals on the walls inside the Laforet)
Alright so when we were done squandering money at the laforet, we (reluctantly) left the air-conditioning behind and started looking for someplace to eat. For some reason we couldnt seem to find anyplace?! The few restaurants we came upon we either closed, too busy, or didn’t allow foreigners (haha oh wow). However, we did come across Metamorphose!
(ew who is that dork?)
Meta isn’t my favorite brand at all-the designs and quality sometimes seem a little off-but their store was by far the nicest. They had tons of stuff, including their new prints, and fluffy white carpets in the dressing rooms, and best of all, one of the girls working there spoke very good english! She was so nice and helpful. Meta is the only lolita brand with a full english site, so it makes sense that somebody like her would be there. I bought a red tartan dress (I’m so happy about that, I’ve been wanting a red tartan jsk forever), bloomers and socks.
Stuff I Bought:
Stuff I Also Bought Recently
(in case I haven't proven myself gay enough)
We gave up on eating and just went back to the hotel after that. We both felt a sick from exhaustion, the heat and jetlag by then. Later we had a light dinner of sushi at one of the hotel’s restaurants. It’s really different to eat sushi in Japan, I think. Maybe it was just this restaurant. I think it was a pretty traditional sushi restaurant. There were no interesting rolls like in american sushi restaurants e.g “rainbow” roll, “dragon” roll, etc, just one type of fish per piece, which I guess is good because then you can appreciate the flavor more. Some of the sushi was prepared a lot better, too. The eel was fresh, and I saw the guy toast it and then put a little of the sauce on (I’ve never seen eel without the sauce on before). This place made their own wasabi, too, so they used it really liberally. One piece I ate had way too much on it and I teared up because it hurt my nose so much!
The next day, we had coffee at starbucks and I found out that even the starbucks pastries in japan are MUCH better than in america, and I think the coffee was better too! Then we decided we had to see something cultural and went to the Meiji Shrine (near harajuku station). It was sweltering again, and the cicadas were near deafening in the forest-y area around the shrine. The shrine was like...yeah, okay. The tori gate was huge and...yeah. But it was nice to see all the wish blocks hung up, too, with notes written on them in all different languages. It reminded me of the wailing all. Lols and there was one that said “What the hell, man? -Keith”.
Then we went to the park, hoping to see all those crazy people you always hear about. I think it was even too hot for them because there was hardly anyone there. Just some unremarkable punk girls in that corner near the entrance, a bad band playing, and some food stalls. Disappointing, because when my dad was there months before he saw this stuff:
and the dancing elvis guys.
Before leaving harajuku I had to try to find 6% dokidoki! Of course the store ended up being smaller than expected, but it was still a magical gay heaven of shiny bows and gay. SOOO many hairclips and rings and earrings and shit! I was flipping out. And the style of the shopgirls was so awesome, too. One of them had sequins for eyebrows and huge candy-shaped hairthings.
Dokidoki has adorable print t-shirts, but they were all size XS. Someone explain this to me. Are they seriously just trying to keep people larger than a japanese size XS from wearing their clothes? Can they not afford to order more than one size? Do they just think everyone is size XS? What the hell, japan. Reirei angry now.
After going back to the hotel to shower because WE WERE SO FRIGGIN GROSS AND SWEATY, I dragged my poor dad back out to check out the loli shops in shinjuku and the Marui Young building, which is kinda like the laforet only smaller. Btssb, HeartE, Emily Temple Cute and Metamorphose were all in one big room/floor thing. It was like a meadow of fluffy loli gayness and I wanted to frolic about but I didn’t because japanese lolitas are intimidating, jeez. There were a lot more there than in the laforet, and they looked so awesome...;3; they were all wearing the most recent dresses, and their hair (wigs?) were done up and curly with huge bows and really tall shoes, how can they walk?? Ahh~ And I am fat gross gaijin ;3; I had already bought too much and I was overwhelmed by all the clothes so I just bought a bow from HeartE. I wish I could work there...TT^TT sobb
For dinner we ate at yet another restaurant in the hotel, Ten-Ichi, which is apparently a pretty famous tempura restaurant. But in the japanese way, the decor was very minimalist, traditional and un-famous looking (unlike the flashy china style). I was just impressed that there are restaurants for tempura only. They give you miso soup and rice, but its mainly tempura. I got some things I’ve never had as tempura before, and I didn’t like all of them. While it was tasty, the tempura was kinda too rich for me and it made us sick.
(condoms galore!)
On Monday, my dad had meetings all morning, so I went to harajuku by myself for a short time. I hadn’t walked down the whole of Takeshita dori, so I did that and bought some stuff. I couldn’t help but try a crepe from one of those cute little crepe houses, but it was so sweet it made me nauseous.
After my dad was done with his meetings, we went to Roppongi Hills. I never knew what Roppongi Hills was before. It’s a fucking huge “integrated property development”. It’s like an indoor neighborhood, or something. It has a mall and a movie theater and museums and restaurants, but people live there too. How awesome.
We went to the top of Mori Tower to Tokyo City View. There’s like, a bar and you stand there to get your mind blown by Tokyo’s huge vastness. The city surrounds mori tower as far as you can see (and you can see tokyo tower, too!). There was a mini aquarium there, which was cooler than I expected. The fish were mostly small, but the tanks were like art. First there were saltwater and freshwater tanks with the colors and plants and fish inside coordinated by artists like living canvases (yeah that sounded corny). Then there were like, chairs and beds and stuff made out of tanks with fish in them, and this big waterfall fountain with fat goldfish, and there were neat little red shrimps with tiny white dots. Some of the bigger fish looked really sad in their small tanks though :< An artful tank isn’t usually a good environment for a fish....
After that, we went to the art museum exhibit. It was evening now, and almost every single person in Mori Tower was on a date, which made me feel lonely~ :< Then we had dim sum for dinner and I felt better ;3; It was sooogood. They had great custard puffs. Hnnn. Outside they were having an “Latin American Festival” which I thought was pretty random, but the music was fun.
Tuesday morning was my last chance to go somewhere, and I still hadn’t seen Akihabara or Ikebukuro, but I really wanted to go to a depachika. We picked a random department store in...I think Shinjuku again and on the way we stopped at the Japanese Sword Museum. The guidebooks rave about it like crazy but its this tiny one-room museum in the middle of nowhere, pretty much.
A lot of people don’t know about depachika. They’re found in the basements on high-end department stores (of which there are many in tokyo). I guess the only western equivalent is a food court, but its really not a food court. It looks more like the makeup floor in nordstroms, only they sell food. It’s mostly packaged gormet food (teas, coffees, liquors, french and japanese pastries, fancy bento, chocolate, etc) but there are also deli-like stalls with fresh fish and meat, fruit stalls, and stalls where they make stuff like tonkastu and dumplings right there.
The amount of pastries almost gave me a seizure srsly. They all looked amazing and I’m sure they all tasted amazing because Japan makes some damn good french pastries. We also got some fresh gyoza. Yummy!! ;3;b And yes, the melons are really expensive.
By the afternoon it was time to leave for Hong Kong. Hong Kong is really jarringly different from Tokyo, and in some ways I like it more than Tokyo. It’s more flashy (being China) and the buildings are really unique. Every building looks different, most of them are really shiny and some have different patterns on the walls that light up at night. Hong Kong is also really hilly, so they have this famous escalator system that goes through the city. Cool huh? And since it used to be owned by Britain, obviously half of the stuff is in english and you hear people talking in chinese and then randomly switching to english, which is so cool. I wish I was bilingual like that ;3;
We stayed at a hotel called The Island Shangri-La, which didnt seem as big as The Imperial Hotel but it was much fancier, with fancy gold edges and fancy rugs and fancy paintings and fancy bubble-looking chandeliers etc. The smell there takes some getting used to, though. Hong Kong smells bad. The inside of the hotel is overwhelmingly perfumed, I guess to cover the smoggy city smell. Weirdly, our floor had a different smell, like a cold air/windex/soap/other chemicals type smell. And there was a big courtyard thing in the middle of the floor made up to look like a jungle with a stream and stuff, that was cool.
So the next morning, we ate breakfast at the most awesome buffet ever. They had pastries (like this really good custard pie and apple tart things), hot western breakfast stuffs, and then hot chinese breakfast stuffs-dim sum! Ohhh yeahhh dim sum at breakfast!
I guess that would only excite me because I’m obsessed with food, yeah? This whole post is like, food, clothes, I’m obsessed with food and clothes.
They also had yummy soup and you could put in vegetables and dumplings and fish balls and different noodles auugghhghh so good I miss it already
and of course they had cereal, fruit, and really good tea~
After eating way too much, we went to this huge mall attached to the hotel...I think called Pacific Place. Jeez, Asia is just a mall. This was the most high end mall I’ve ever been in, I think. There were no normal shops, only super expensive couture shops. I spent a while drooling over Cloe and Miu Miu and Dior and awesome Nine West shoes etc but there was no point in even going in, how the hell can any young person afford that stuff?
There was a “food court” under this mall too, but it was more like a depachika. More like a supermarket/ food court, maybe. It was like the Whole Foods Market under that building in Colombus Square, only 5x better. They had a counter with a huge amount of smoothies and squeezed fruit juices, sushi made korean style (it was so good unf), gelato (also amazing unf), a bebimbop counter, and everything else on the planet too. Food~~~
We ate dinner at a fancy chinese restuarant~ I love all these restaurant because the waiters and waitresses wear cute chinese uniforms~ *w* Our waiter had crazy cockatiel looking hair. Another waiter had red hair, another waiter had green hair, and another one had a mohawk. But this was a fancy restaurant? I guess rules are different in Hong Kong.
There were a lot of interesting dishes on the menu (i.e “marinated pig’s trotters” “hairy fish maw” “cold jellyfish”). This was a peking style restaurant, so one of their specialties is Peking Duck, which I’m sure tastes good, but they serve it with the head still on and I can’t deal with that. They also have this dish called “Beggar’s Chicken”, a funny name because it costs $45 and you have to order it like a day in advance. The (rather small) chicken is wrapped with different leaves, then covered in clay and baked for a long time. When it’s served, the waiter cracks open the clay shell with a flashy golden mallet (it sounds cooler than it actually was). What was really cool was the noodle making demonstration one of the guys gave. He came out with a table and a big wad of dough. I can’t even describe his awesome noodle-making techniques, but a few minutes later he had a ton of long, perfectly shaped noodles. There was a lot of twisting and twirling of dough.
On the last day, dad brought me into the less developed area of Hong Kong. It pretty much looked like Chinatown, only poorer and with more neon signs. We walked down a street that was one big open-air fish and meat market, so you can imagine it smelled horrible. People were buying fish that were still flopping around and there were bloody ducks and pigs with their heads still on sdjfhdkjfh auughghh I should become a vegetarian
I kept whining that I wanted to go to the zoo, but my dad insisted we go to the nearby temple first. We wandered down a few more streets filled with antique shops and came upon the temple, which looked pretty random sitting there between skyscrapers. The inside of the temple was even more stifling than outside, dark and dirt-floored, and it was impossible to breathe and near impossible to see because the air was so thick with incense and smoke. There were several chinese kids with lighted sticks of incense that they placed before large groups of small statues. Some older people appeared to be meditating and praying seriously. Some of the decorations inside looked like little christmas trees hanging from the ceiling. I couldn’t stand to stay inside for long because the smoke was making my skin sting.
The zoo was on top of a big hill or something, so we walked up a long path before we finally got up there, and by then we were soaked with sweat in the most disgusting way. But it was worth it because the zoo had some types of monkeys I had never seen before plus a jaguar! They had a lot of lemurs. They were really playful and fluffy but they have really unnerving eyes and one of them kept glaring at me. None of the other monkeys were as energetic. Maybe it was because it was so hot, but I imagined they looked sad. The animal exhibits here were nothing like the ones at, say, the Bronx zoo. They were just big cages, with plastic and metal bars for the animals to perch on. There wasn’t even any grass on the ground. The most depressing were the orangutans. I had never seen an orangutan before. There were SO much bigger than I had imagined, huge. There were two of them, sitting on the very top bar of their cage, staring into space. They kept their faces hidden and they looked like huge furry orange blobs up there.
The jaguar was also resting, but it was still breathtaking to see. No one else was around, and we stared at each other for a long time. With it just lying there, yawning and stretching, it seemed like just a big house cat-its manner was similar to my black cats’, especially. But its jaws could crush skulls, I’m sure. If I’m lucky (...or unlucky), I might be able see one in its natural habitat in Costa Rica (I'm going in February). That would be so awesome! I think I want to become a biological conservationist, so I’m probably see one again someday. (lols best part of Hong Kong: crappy zoo)
That night we had cantonese-style chinese food. My dad got shrimp with ginger vermicelli noodles (g-good) and I got thick noodles with a thick egg sauce, but the best thing we got was the eggplant, actually. The saltiness of chinese (and japanese) food takes getting used to, though.
And that was it! The next day we flew four hours back to Tokyo, then 13 hours back to NY, not including some of the delays we had, so...yeah I don’t even want to figure out how long I was awake for. And on Wednesday we’re leaving for Bermuda at 5 in the morning!! D: AHH. At least that flight’s only an hour and a half!
P.S tokyo has the best toilets and vending machines *w*
P.P.S oh and here are some pictures from my disney trip that I havent uploaded until now lolz
