tokyo!



i'm now back in the hotel in tokyo; we're in the ginza district and oppsosite the train tracks where there is this ginza corridor with lots of small eateries - we stumbled upon this while walking back from dinner, a small eatery in one of the small lanes where we had good katsu don - the pork was moist enough on the inside when you bit into the meat and still slightly crispy on the outside. today we took the train from narita airport to our hotel and yh and el took us to a ramen shop they found the last time which served delicious ramen - the broth was pork-based and really good for the cold weather; they served enough char siew slices and half and egg plus a huge slice of seaweed and some other crunchy thing which was quite nice.

after that we walked down ginza and checked out the swarovski building and the swatch building by shigeru ban with the internal green walls and we checked out the tokyo international forum and we headed onto muji where they had the muji house on exhibit. there are really nice things there and we liked a chair in walnut and some lamps but we figured it wasn't logical to bring them back. the muji house exhibit was really cool though - i liked the glossy mosaics that was used to tile the whole bathroom. there is a muji cafe, like the cafe in ikea and it was pretty crowded.

i think it's great to come at christmas because they light up the real small pine trees by the roadside or hang glittering stars on them and all the shops are decorated for christmas. while on the way back from dinner we chanced upon the LV building by Jun Aoki with the luminious skin. it's so cool to see it in reality other than in the JA magazines.

a japanese orchestra is now playing on tv and mingyao is commenting on the instruments.

tomorrow it's harujuku and shibuya!