Jan. 7, 2012 - Target!

Yep, we found Target.  Well, eventually we found Target.  It's not exactly Target, but it'll do.  It's missing some of Target's stuff and some of Target's selection, but it has a lot of stuff Target doesn't have.  When we had been with the TGA person on apartment move-in day, she pointed out a store called Tokyu Hands.  From her description, it sounded like a good store to know.  Here's a link to the floor guide of the Shibuya Tokyu Hands so you can see what I mean.

But before we headed out to the store, today was the day our air shipment came!  It was almost like Christmas!  We didn't remember what we had packed in those four boxes, but there were definitely some things we were hoping for.  Maybe we'd put shower curtains in there?  Maybe more hangers?  Maybe Drew's bolster (that he puts under his legs when sleeping to help his back)?  What other useful items might we have put in there?.......  Turns out not much.  I don't think we did a particularly good job packing for this move.  Might have something to do with the short amount of time we did it in.

Headed out after lunch (where we ate our noodle soup bowls from Softbank, using our chopsticks from Softbank - definitely made it seem like we got the cell phones at a discount :) ) to find Tokyu Hands.  A picture of Greer and Cooper eating their lunch, practicing with their chopsticks:

Shibuya, besides being the name of our ward, is also the name of the shopping district around Shibuya Station.  We didn't know exactly where Tokyu Hands was located, just that it was in the Shibuya shopping district.  We took the subway to Shibuya station and then Drew whipped out his new iPhone to try out the GPS.  Seemed like a good idea, but the iPhone did not want us to go in the direction I wanted us to head.  Now, I'm somewhat directionally challenged and I'm not much of a shopper, so Drew had no reason to go in my direction.  But I think I really wanted to find this store.  After using the GPS for quite awhile, going pretty far from Shibuya station, going in some circles, finally deciding the pin we were searching for was probably some office for Tokyu Hands, we went in the direction I wanted to go.  And we found it!  I have to tease Drew a little here since it's not very often my sense of direction is better than his.  But of course, he wasn't really using his sense of direction.  He was using his iPhone.  Remember, it's just a tool. :)   (And I won't mention the first time we went to the grocery store, when Drew had us going the wrong way and I got us back on track.)

We didn't find everything we were looking for, but we found a lot of it, like a shower curtain, more hangers, and a bolster for Drew (you know, those items we were hoping were in the air shipment :) ).  We managed to spend a lot of yen.  Definitely a handy store to which I will return.  Again, the kids were real troupers.  No complaining while we searched and searched for the store.  And while we were in the store, investigating several, though not all, of its departments, only mild complaining.  And we didn't even end up buying anything specifically for them - but Greer does have her eye on a number of items.

Japanese word of the day:  mise  (click to hear pronunciation) means "shop/store"