Japan, photography, Travel

Ginza, Akihabara and Linh


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Ola, today I shall talk about our very first venture out into big city Tokyo which mainly consisted of trying to get familiar with central Tokyo and most importantly, to pick up our super cute travel mate Linh.

We were to pick her up at Tokyo Station, a huge complex of infinite escalators, trains, shinkansen and pretty damn good foods. We could have spend the entire day in Tokyo station no joke, but obviously we wanted to get out and explore as much as we could. So the closest walkable district first was Ginza, the ritzy district full of expensive designer names and high end restaurants.

We arrived around noonish so it was time to grab lunch somewhere, once we got lost in Ginza, it wasn’t hard to find the endless deep alleyways of restaurants and bakeries. We could not make a damn decision on where we wanted to eat…!

We wanted it to be budget friendly, which wasn’t a problem. There were plentiful restaurants offering a decent lunch special/combo around $9-12. I was being really stupid and kept wanting to walk around and see what were our options but our hunger was kicking in and we both were getting pretty hangry (hungry+angry).

Finally, we settled for some typical japanese diner styled place…I had no idea how we came to decide on this, so i’m going to guess we gave the “fuck it” and went on in.

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The place was pretty full, we weren’t sure if there were any seats, but hurray! they had a basement floor with lots of space. They had a funny system of delivering the orders down to the lower level. It was basically a elevator box for food which was right behind Scott’s head.

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We ordered some pretty standard stuff, I chose a curry type dish and Scott went with a beefy lunch option. It was good for what it was. We were full and satisfied, we asked for the bill and went to the front cashier to pay as we left.

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Scott and I had a decent amount of time to kill still before we needed to pick up Linh. I think her scheduled arrival was around 5pm-ish? We chose Akihabara as our next destination as we thought it was one of the more interesting districts to check out, it was in hindsight a bad idea because once we settled in and got excited from the many things to see…our time there was cut short because we had other priorities after all.

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Oh?? Whats this? MOCHI? I love this stuff, so soft and chewy filled with yummy shit…oh man, i busted out my wallet quickly and started to scan what I wanted…Ice cream filled?? Even better!

This place was right outside of the Akihabara JR station, it was really easy to spot and not too hard to miss either.

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The display looks sooooooooooooo good right?? Of course it does.It’s plastic after all…the actual product compared to the display was a little off, the size was definitely not what I was expecting.

The cute sales lady was trying to ask me in Japanese if I was going to eat this NOW or LATER,  obviously…I had no idea what the hell she was saying but luckily she busted out some English and we said it would be for later and so she threw a cute mini ice pack in the bag,

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I can’t remember all the flavours we got, but the one in this picture was a caramel pudding. Yes, it was delicious.

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We saved some for linh of course :D

So we left the busy district to head back to Tokyo Station where we stressed the fuck out trying to find her.

That’ll be left for the next blog post la.

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new york city, Uncategorized

Skulls & Tacos for lunch

Sunny day out in NYC, Soho. We were browsing around, attempting to find something worthwhile and make the best of our trip…then came along a shop we passed by that quickly caught our eyes. No this surely was not a clothing store or anything to do with fashion, but instead a shop of peculiar oddities.

It seemed most boutiques in Soho are dazzled with large store fronts with a contemporary modern atmosphere, but not this place…cluttered and relied on artificial lighting, you would think walking in it would have some sort of musky odor, luckily not. Instead our eyes took a gander at the store of Evolution, a shop nestled in between shops down a busy strip that strictly sold artificial/real animal bones, parts and pieces.

They carry all sorts of animal bones/parts you can think of, it felt like a museum was for sale.

A pretty obvious theme going on in the store, lots of different skulls to choose from, whether it be human or animal, artificial or real, they had it all.

It was interesting to see they sold bits and pieces of different animal parts…but my question would be, what are people doing with these parts?

Alligator head that Scott ended up picking up for his room, cute little bugger don’t you think?

I really like this, I kind of regret not picking it up…maybe because the laziness in me probably won’t even build it.

The back walls are littered with organized frames with all sorts of pinned bugs, the staff was also very attentive and occasionally asked if we need help or had any questions, very lovely people.

So worth the check out, they have two floors, upstairs contain posters and expensive pieces…I left the boutique with a pair of skull earrings and Scott took a dead animal head home with him hah.

Of course naturally you would be hungry after looking at dead stuff right? We saw an interesting Taco truck on a busy street and decided to give it a try.

Yeap, they were very delicious. Scott went back for seconds.

Great menu, so many interesting options and toppings, the line up built up very quickly for good reason.

Tacos were well priced too, freshly made and none of that minced meat crap, the tacos were roughly $3 depending on what you want.

Mine was sooo good, I forgot what I ordered :( something to do with deliciousness though

We passed by this obnoxiously looking yellow truck and realized it was fancy pants ice cream…how could we resist? Ice cream for dessert!

They carried really interesting and lovely sounding flavours, such as Red Current cream, Giandujia (Chocolate & hazenlnut) and different tea ice creams like Earl Grey…the truck had many other flavours but the Earl Grey was the only one I was focusing on so I kinda disregarded the rest.

Gourmet Ice cream definitely made me a happy camper, although I was extremely full from all the tacos…I kinda didn’t finish my ice cream and ditched it mid way :S oh how I regret that so…

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