Mass. Of. Humanity.

Today was a day of being completely overwhelmed. We started off at another museum, and once again it appears that the Japanese are really damn good at putting together incredible museums. The Edo-Tokyo Museum is a government-run museum devoted to the history of Tokyo. Everything about this place was incredible, and we had a great time learning about the history of this amazing city.

From the museum we hopped onto the subway toward Harajuku, which was our first foray into an absolutely, mind bogglingly crazy mass of humanity. Sunday is said to be the busiest day down there, and I sure hope that is true because there wasn’t a square inch of sidewalk left for another human. The bridge just outside of the Harajuku station is where the famous Harajuku girls are supposed to hang out, but we were disappointed to find only a few there! We decided to make our rounds through the streets and try again a little later.

The park near our hotel that includes the Meiji Shrine also bumps up against the Harajuku station, so we stopped in for one last look at the amazing grounds and the shrine. We also grabbed lunch while we here, figuring it would be too crowded out on the streets - glad we did. 

From the park we headed down Takeshita Dori, a pedestrian-only street completely packed to the gills with people and shops. It was an interesting mix of shoe shops with the most amazing Nikes I’ve never seen and Lolita/Harajuku type places. We also ducked into a few thrift stores full of “American” clothing and Harajuku Daiso, a 100¥ store - these places are amazing, basically a dollar store but with really cool stuff. Fighting our way down the street was quite an experience, it is literally wall to wall people but amazingly you do not get bumped into and everyone is extremely polite - I love this place! 

We turned down a side street to check out Togo Shrine, which features an antique market on some Sundays - unfortunately not this one. Circling back around into the mass of humanity we came across a line for the Forever 21 (apparently the girls had to get tickets ahead of time to go in) and then an incredibly organized protest. From there it was a quick walk to Kiddy Land, a 5 story building full of wonderful Japanese toys, robots, cute animals, etc. Needless to say we came back to the hotel with full bags.

Check out the pictures from today.