Shop 'til you drop...

I woke up bright and early this morning (not) and headed off towards Harajuku for some retail therapy and Harajuku-girl-spotting. I left my apartment, armed with my camera and credit card but in no way was I prepared for what the Tokyo summer threw at me. I have never experienced heat like today - well over 35 degrees, humid, barely a breeze and clear blue skies. Honestly, I thought that I was going to melt or just spontaneously combust on the pavement.

Shopping in Tokyo has to be the best in the world. I hit Forever21 first to grab a few nice things and was glad that I got there early(ish) as when I left at about noon, there was a massive crowd queueing to get in! I wandered in and out of a few places in Harajuku before ending up in Kiddyland, aka, Holly's-dream-land. Let me try to show you exactly why I loved (and my bank balance hated) this shop so much:


:O

And that was just one small display on one of the six floors! Needless to say, I bought a lot of Hello Kitty related paraphernelia, as well as countless other charater-branded stuff. Happy face!

I then headed towards Jingu-bashi, where all the cool kids hang out on Sundays. Or at least they're meant to. There weren't that many dressed up teens hanging about (it was absolutely boiling...) and not all of them were happy for me to take photos of them. (At least I asked! Lots of people just snapped away like they were visiting the zoo.) Here are the happy few who laughed at my attempts to ask for their permission in Japanese:









I then walked down to Shibuya, got lost in a department store and then made a bee-line for Shibuya 109 - the place to shop for the latest Tokyo trends. It's amazing: nine floors of concessions, each with it's own distinct style of clothing and music blaring from huge speakers. The shop assistants are dressed from head to toe in whatever mini-shop they're working for sells and were often standing at the entrance, shouting about what's on sale or better than the next door shop. It was shopping like I'd never experienced before - hundreds of concessions, hundreds of immaculately-styled Shibuya girls, shouting, overlapping dance tracks from neighbouring shops, squeezed into a building that's not quite big enough for it all - I loved it! I got myself one of those little straw trilbys too :)

By the time I left there it had been dark for some time and my feet were about to mutiny, so I dived into the first ramen joint I could find and then got the train home. The chashu-ramen (char sui pork and noodles) was delicious and tasted even better because I had ordered it from a vending machine! I kid you not. The machine is just at the entrance to the shop:


I put in my money, made my selection, took my ticket (the order is sent to the kitchen) and then joined the queue for a seat. Here's what I got; not bad for a meal from a vending machine!

I'm such a gaijin...

So I actually did get pushed onto the train this morning. Or rather, pushed by the person who was being pushed onto the train. I promised pictures of the 'pushers' so I took some! I got some really strange looks from the other commuters when I whapped out my camera...

I spent most of today beginning to learn the stuff I'll need to know for my 'Sales Rep 2' exam, namely: accountancy (balance sheets etc), GDP and P&L. There's a considerable amount more to it but these are the subjects that I can teach myself from Wikipedia. I got to sit down and have a chat with the two guys who trade securitised mortgage and assest bonds today and learnt a lot from them. I found this branch of the market particularly interesting as when assessing risk, there's a massive human element to it - people who take out mortages could win the lottery, get divorced or get hit by a bus, and all these factors affect the probability that the mortgage provider will lose out on cash in one way or another. Mortgages are simultaneously a very secure and a very risky loan for a bank to make, and this is kind of how the mortgage bond market has evolved. At least, that's what I got from today...

After work, I headed south past Tokyo station and headed towards Ginza. I had no idea what to expect from this area of Tokyo apart from knowing that there would be some designer shops and that I wanted to find the statue of Godzilla. I did:



Ginza was incredible! It is like Times Square on steroids and spread over a much larger area. Every building lights up and flashes and there are billboards with massive speakers blaring the adverts as well, just incase you missed the gigantic screen. As a result of everyone (including me!!) in Tokyo working ridiculously long hours (and not stopping for lunch, I'd like to add - more on work ethics another time, I'm too tired) all the shops stay open until 8/9pm. Shopping in the dark in this area has to be better anyway because then you can properly experience the full lightshow!

The designer stores are everywhere and every label you could think of occupies all the floors of its own twenty-storey, ultra-modern building. There are also massive department stores on every block, sometimes two right next door to each other. I've heard from my colleagues that the Japanese are very fond of department store shopping, and that each depato is favoured by a different demographic. I was just happy to find the biggest Muji I had ever seen in the basement of one of them! Who knew that Muji sold food as well as everything else?! It was a department store within a department store!

Some of the shops I particularly liked the look of were, Uniqlo:



This department store filled with designer concessions that was rainbow-themed:



And the Hermes shop, which was completely clad in polished glass bricks: