Since I’ve already written about the day of the amazingly awesome Buck-Tick concert I attended, I’ll skip that day and go straight to the next.

Being Christmas time, and still having to do a fair bit of shopping, I decided to make my final two full days in Tokyo shopping days. I started out going to Shibuya – an absolutely fantastic place to go if you like crowds of people. I can’t stress enough how overwhelming it is just to cross the street there. I found this:

It’s a live camera at Shibuya crossing. (I swear I could watch this video for hours, especially when it’s crowded at lunch time. Is it just me?) On the far left side, outside the shot, is the train station. It is from that side of the street that I took this picture:

and here are two photos I took

 

at the end of the crosswalk on the far right of the youtube video screen

I went from there just a short way up the block to Tower Records

and bought a CD by, you guessed it, Buck-Tick, as well as a Christmas present for my best friend John – the new AC/DC CD with a bonus poster. He’s now likely the only person in this little town of ours to be in possession of an official AC/DC poster in Japanese.

Its funny, here in North America McDonald’s seems to me to be generally the most garish thing in any cityscape. In a place like Tokyo, the golden arches get all but lost.

amongst the karaoke bars and cartoon characters. But there it doesn’t seem garish. It just all awesome scenery.

From there I went to Akihabara, the area of Tokyo which is famous for anything gadget-like or to have anything to do with anime, to shop for my kids. As always, the store lights are stunning.

With so little space, a tiny shop is expanded by going up – some of the stores have seven floors of retail area. I would have liked to have gone back to Shibuya to see it all lit up, but by the time I finished having dinner with my friend Kellie (who I’ve known for about seven years through LiveJournal but never met in person before) in Shinjuku, I was too tired to make the extra stop before going back to the hotel. It had been yet another nine hour day of walking around.

To be continued…