Shibuya, Shinjuku at closing time.

Today was my first full day in Japan again, and I spent most of it in Shibuya getting my hair cut. I also walked around checking out the local shops and picking up a few things. Even though it has been close to 6 months since I was last here the place seems very familiar to me. Instead of 6 months it feels more like 6 minutes. It wasn’t that hard to get my bearings and remember where everything was. It felt really easy to navigate though the city. The stations are however a different story, with the execption of monzen-nakacho all the stations in the system are as confusing as ever. I am still surprised at how well I was able to remember some of these places. I suppose when a place like Tokyo makes a big impression on someone its hard to forget what its like there.

Afterwards we went drinking down in Shinjuku. We headed there by the means of the Yamanote line which was sort of packed. We ended up going to a umecho place which served up many different kinds of the drink. It was a great experience since its hard to get good umecho in the states I was quite please that the selection was so large. Out of the six different types of umecho I tasted only four were bad, not bad in my opinion. What was interesting was afterwards though. Most of the time on my last trip we headed back before 10pm, but tonight we were out past that. This gave me a unique opportunity which I didn’t get on my last trip here, which was to see places close for the night. It was quite interesting to see a once lively crowded Shinjuku only hours ago, only to become a more quite subdued place.

Now don’t let this think the place was empty, far from it, Shinjuku was still as busy as San Francisco’s Union Square during the afternoon. It was quite a sight to see most of the people heading towards the subway instead of out into the city. I also got to see some of the homeless who camped out in front of closed buildings, some even had futons. There were also some girls puking in allyways and of course an ambulance or two parked out in bars and other establishments, no doubt coming to the rescue of people who had a little too much fun that night.

Tonight is also the start of what I hope will be a continuing trend for the rest of the stay, which is to buy a different midnight snack at a convini, try it out, and tell everyone what its like. I’m not sure the exact format yet, but i’ll go with this right now. Tonight I had an orange flavored drink and two different types of onigiri, ebi and uni, and a salmon one. Both onigiri were the same brand and cost ¥180 and ¥165 respectively. The first one I tried was the ebi and uni, which is shrimp and sea urchin roe in English. The ebi was decent, something that you might expect when you buy nigiri ebi sushi in the states. The uni was kind of bad it wasn’t actually a piece of uni, but rather a little bit used like mayo on a sandwich. Overall I would give it 3 out of 5 points. Second was the salmon. One of the most common types of onigiri one sees in Japan, every convini you see will probably have this flavor in stock. This one was spot on the salmon was in nice big pieces, although not as much as some others I have had in the past, but the salmon was nicely salted and matched perfectly with the rice. One problem I had with both onigiri was the nori. There was no separation between the nori and the rice before opening so the nori was left moist, not my favorite, but some may like it like this. Another thing was the nori didn’t cover the whole onigiri it left the corners white, again another form of preference, I like my onigiri completely covered in something whether it be nori or some other ingredient. Therefore I will have to rate this salmon onigiri a 4.5 out of 5, because of those small preferential things and also because I didn’t feel there was enough salmon in there. The orange drink was pretty tasty, I cant give much more detail then that because I cant quite remember what it tasted like, but I think I’ll give it a 4 out of 5. I would definitely put it down as one of the better drinks I’ve had, but you probably wouldn’t see me rushing the convini to get it.
Here are some highlights of today:

Big Nintendo Wii ad in Shibuya

Shinjuku at night

Tonights midnight snack

Heres a link to the full set of pictures for the day: link