Here's a picture of them as they set out to journey to the bus stop (I asked Cooper if he thought he should brush his hair this morning. Hmm, wonder what he said.) :
Every other Wednesday is an early release day for the kids, when school is dismissed an hour and a half early. Today I had a little shopping expedition for us. Greer's wardrobe is more suited to Houston, so we needed to get some layers for her. Houston can get cold in the winter, but after a few days, it usually warms up. Then it will be nice for awhile before it gets cold again. I think Greer is still expecting that to happen here, even though the highs have been in the 40's the entire time we've been here, and it's often windy. I keep telling her that Tokyo has a real winter, not as cold as Cleveland or Greenwich, but still a winter; however, I think she keeps hoping I'm wrong, in this, as in so many other areas. I also wanted to look for another pair of shoes for Cooper.
I knew there were stores with what we needed in the Shibuya shopping district, such as Uniqlo for shirts for Greer and ABC Mart for Cooper's shoes. The trick would be to find them. I went to Uniqlo's website, and there were some English words, including "store locator." Piece of cake! If only. While "store locator" was in English, nothing else related to the location of the store was. I know there's supposed to be some way Google can translate for you, but I haven't figured that out. No matter. We would find the stores, intrepid navigators that we are.
We (I) decided to walk - it would take about the same amount of time. So we put "Shibuya station" into our iPhone and used the map. Now, some of you are saying, "It's about time." But I don't think you quite understand where I am coming from. Here's a picture of the phone that I've had for the last 7 or 8 years (the one Greer thinks I should check to see if a museum wants):
It takes a little time to make a transition from that to an iPhone. There's a learning curve. But I'll eventually get the hang of it (or my kids will, and they'll show me what I need to know). It was supposed to be about a 20-25 minute walk. If you've read previous posts, you'll understand why I considered it a victory when we arrived in the shopping district after a mere 45 minutes.
We started searching for the stores we wanted, and we found........a Krispy Kreme! Of course, for research purposes, we decided we should check it out. Plus, Cooper had already started complaining of being hungry. After our research snack (the conclusion of our research was that it was good), we quickly saw Uniqlo. That may not be as impressive as it sounds since I think there's more than one location in Shibuya. Success - several turtlenecks for Greer. Greer, being the shopper that she is, thought perhaps we could spend more time shopping for her. However, it was time to forge ahead looking for shoes, though Greer did want me to take some pictures of her trying on clothes:
We soon found ABC Mart. Really, I think we did well. Unfortunately, no luck there. We've adopted the Japanese custom of removing our shoes when we enter our house. Cooper's a little tired of always have to tie and untie his shoes, so we were looking for some slip-on shoes for him. They had some men/women slip-on sneakers that he liked, but they didn't come in quite a small enough size - we needed a half size smaller. From our walk around Shibuya with Kim, I remembered that there was another ABC Mart right near Tower Records. We found it, but again, no luck. We'll have to try something else for Cooper. A note about Tower Records: one floor of it is for books, which we visited with Kim to pick up a good Tokyo map. While there, we allowed the kids to each pick a book from the English-language section, since they had been such good sports as we walked all over Shibuya. We also saw "A Long Walk to Water," which is a book Greer has been wanting me to read. Since she didn't own it (but wanted to, as she does with most books), I decided to buy it to read. I have to admit here that I didn't pay much attention to the price at the time. Afterwards, I noticed the U.S. price of $5.99 was on the back of the book above the barcode. Next to that was the Tower Records sticker with the Japan price of 1,029 yen (around $13). I think we're going to be making more use of our e-readers here.
Also on our walk with Kim, he purchased some cream puffs for us from a stand near the Hachiko exit. The kids and I thought it would be a good idea to buy some of those to bring home for after dinner. We found where the stand had been (we were pretty good finding things today!), but there was no stand. We thought maybe it was just a weekend thing. But as long as we were right there by the subway, the kids talked me into taking the subway home. I still don't think it's any faster, but I'm not sure they're convinced. On the plus side, as long as we were at the subway station, we popped into the grocery store to purchase some ice cream treats to replace our lost cream puffs.
Japanese word of the day: basu (bah-soo) means "bus"
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