shibuya! harujuku!

this morning we met the others in the lobby and walked two blocks with sl and mf to find some breakfast. we found a coffee place - pronto and had a pastry/bread and coffee each. we went back to the hotel and met the rest and we walked to the supermarket/food mart next to shimbashi station where some of them had vege juices and mingyao and i found some sweet potatoes to munch on. we took the train to harujuku station and followed the rest to the meiji shrine because el and yh wanted to check it out. it's surrounded by a huge forest/park so the walk to the shrine was very nice - orange/yellow autumn trees surrounding us on both sides of the path. later we went to harujuku where el took us to a japanese pasta shop that they found great the last time - it was really nice and the portions were huge. i couldn't make up my mind for the longest time on what i wanted to eat and finally i decided on a pasta with olive oil base, garlic and chilli and seafood - that was good and it was toasty and warm inside the shop.

we walked down the streets of harujuku a bit and went to the shop that sold porter stuff and we saw some really nice wallets/bags. mf led us to the GA gallery which was a long walk away - past a residential/shop district. what i really love about walking about tokyo is looking at the architecture of the small to mid-scale buildings. the scale of things are generally more human - not just about huge lofty windows everywhere. and how they put things together is really fascinating to discover. people are really experimenting with green walls - it's done very tastefully here. the GA gallery was awesome really- i loved the concrete walls. we went to the GA exhibit featuring japanese architects like sejima and toyo ito - i didn't know toyo ito was designing a condo at oxley in singaore.

we walked back to harujuku and decided to split up from there - mingyao and i decided to walk down omotesando which was quite nice because of the scale of the buildings and the trees - we saw the tod's building and dior building and the chanel building/store that also contained the moma design store where i bought some realy cool things. we checked out h&m but i was more interested in the building and joinery rather than the clothes which weren't anything special - but the japs are crazy over it cos it just opened in japan so there are queue lines outside still. we decided it was still early and we walked about 15 minutes to shibuya where we were on a mission to find onisuka tiger - which we did in parco 3 building's basement and i saw the shoe i was looking for for years! the tiger mexico 66 blue/white/red shoe where they have the size for guys in singapore but i can never find the size for women so yeah it was rather costly but since i'm right here in japan and i've been looking for it for years mingyao decided it's a no questions asked and got it for me as my christmas present. so that's like, mission accomplished! we walked down shibuya some more after that - oh yeah we checked out the tower records too and hmv to find a particular music dvd but we didn't find it and we went to the shibuya crossing to take a look at the lights changing and crowds of people corssing and decided that was that for the day and took the ginza line back to shimbashi station.

we stumbled into tadao ando's omotesando hills mall by the back and were really fascinated by the interior - with his trademark concrete and i loved how he had the seats set into the walls with timber seats and the space was decorated quite magically with giant crystal chandeliers and disco balls that made the light move about the space in a magical way.

we went to the supermarket again and got some fruits and water - the japanese grapes looked beautiful and it was only six singapore dollars so we bought a packet and we bumped into aim and shimon who were holding some discounted sashimi so we decided to get a pack of sashimi too because it was going at 50% off. we also bought some yaki tori and headed back to the hotel with many plastic bags and had dinner.