Nippori + Ueno

Saturday I met up with Tomoko, the girl I met when my host mom and I went to see the tea ceremony some time ago, and we went shopping around Ueno. First we met up at Nippori. I got there first and waited at the appropriate exit, and waited like...a half hour. >_> I was like "wtf the station isn't exactly big" but it turns out that she accidentally went out the opposite side and thought she was at the right exit for the longest time. Eventually she figured it out and came back through to find me, lol. Whoops. She was a TOTAL SPAZZ as soon as she greeted me though, holy cow. XD I was so surprised since she was the typical quiet, shy girl when we first met, and then all of a sudden she was acting really high-strung and energetic. But that made it more fun. XD We headed out in search of the cheap clothing stores we had been hearing about. Neither of us has been there before, so we were both new to the area. It wasn't hard to find the stores though. We popped into one that was pretty big and Tomoko bought a couple of things. I decided to wait since I didn't see any MUST HAVE items, and we moved on. We wandered down the street and passed SOOOO many fabric stores!! There was even a flag that said "Fabric town" lol which was so true. There were more fabric stores than clothing stores. I really had to resist going into them because I knew I would take forever. D: That will have to be saved for its own trip, seriously. It was intense.

All I ended up buying was a cute skirt that was under 700 yen, but if/when I go back there, I'll probably get more. I didn't really know what I wanted beyond shoes, and since there weren't really any shoes stores, that's all I got.


We passed this HUGE dog at one point. He was so big, and so cute and fluffy. I wanted to pet him.


The Nippori area, namely the fabric town, lol.


The other side of Nippori station, which was WAY bigger than the other side, wtf. Looks like a completely different area.

Tomoko REALLY wanted to take purikura, so we next went on a hunt for a game center. After searching all over and finding NONE, we asked a kouban about it and said there weren't any in the area, but surely there were some at Ueno. So we headed to the station and went to Ueno, which was only 2 stops away.


Uenoooooo


Ueno was full of shops, and VERY crowded. This street was lined with shops and restaurants. We looked through quite a few of them.


Oh my god, this was so awesome. xD These are GARGANTUOUS takoyaki. I kind of wanted one, but decided against it. I wanted a picture at least. So huge. Normal takoyaki are a little smaller than an egg, but as you can see, these were big enough to have an egg INSIDE of them.


lol These shoes were spectacular.


This was meant to be a picture of what we were guessing was a kouban (small police station) since it had stuff about "crime stopping" written on it. It was the coolest kouban ever.

Anyway, we found a game center and took some purikura.



Tomoko is kind of ADORABLE. She makes me look old. D:

After lots of (mostly window) shopping, we decided to get dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food in Japan is WAY different from Chinese food in America (undoubtedly much more authentic), and thus, I was unfamiliar with what they had beyond ramen, so I just got ramen, lol. It was okay. Too much onion though. After we ate, we pretty much just headed back to Omiya, which was cool since it was getting late. We parted at Omiya and I went home after checking out Book-Off for a few minutes.