Sunshine City

Good news, everyone! Cinnamon and I are, in fact, NOT dead! We did, however, feel that earthquake this morning. I woke up because my bed was shaking, and Cinnamon was whispering "Hey Persimmon, can you feel that?" I thought she was either kicking or shaking my bed, so I told her yes, I could feel it, and cut it out. When she told me it wasn't her, we just assumed it was an earthquake. It wasn't very strong where we are, though. Apart from the bed shaking and a few items on our desk, nothing major happened, so no need to fear! But now we can say we've been in an earthquake.

Early Tuesday morning, Cinnamon awoke to the peculiar feeling that something in the room was moving, Upon looking around, she discovered she was right! Somehow, this little guy had snuck in while we had our window open, so Cinnamon kindly helped him back outside. We've also seen a pretty big gecko on the window at night, but thankfully he stays outside.

But now back to our daily adventures. Wednesday, we headed out to Ikebukuro on the north side of Tokyo to hit up Sunshine City, a complex of several buildings full of shopping and restaurants and offices and a mini theme park called Namco Namja Town (which - you guessed it - was created by the video game design company Namco). But we were mostly in it for the shopping, of which there was plenty.

That's outside the second level of the main building. I think it's called the Alta building? And the building behind it, the World Import Mart building had some sort of Tokyo Fair thing going on, but it looked like a convention type of thing, so we didn't check it out.

Across from the sign and looking out toward the road is a big Animate building and a K-books. (Both of those stores sell manga, anime DVDs and CDs and related goods). Also, somewhere over to the left of the Animate is the Amlux Toyota Auto Salon, where you can check out all the newest Japanese Toyota models. ...But Cinnamon didn't want to go there, so we didn't. Also, I don't have any pictures of it, sorry.

So after snapping a few pictures outside here, we headed on up the stairs to the 3rd floor of the Sunshine City building to do some more shopping. There were a lot of clothing stores - some pretty pricey - a lot of cheap shoes, though sadly none for me, (would you believe my feet are size LL in Japan? That's how they size shoes - S, M, L, LL), and also quite a few hats. But we didn't find anything we liked, so we didn't get anything.

I don't know, this is some sort of park next to the building. It was also photographed from the same place all the other pictures were.

Next to this building there's what's called "Sunshine 60", a skyscraper with a bunch of offices in it, but on the top few floors there are restaurants and an observatory. We were going to check out the observatory, but it cost like 640 yen (about $6) and we're cheap, so we didn't go. Maybe some other time.

After our exhaustive shopping trip, we decided to take our chances with a sit down restaurant (as opposed to fast food), so we chose - that's right - the only Mexican place in the building! Hahaha, it was really good, though! I swear one day we'll get around to actually eating Japanese food.. But so much of it is... kinda weird. And they put fried eggs on everything. You find fried eggs on pasta, on pizza, on hamburgers, and on their "hamburg steaks" (which are pretty much like hamburgers without the bun, usually dressed up with some sort of sauce or onions and various other veggies and whatnot).

But we'll be back to Sunshine City at a later date, because I'm pretty sure I'll be spending my birthday at Namja Town. They have a "Desert Stadium", a "Gyoza Stadium" and an "Ice Cream Stadium", so we will definitely be stuffing our faces full of delicious goodies~

On our way back home that night, we finally got to see some of the bright lights of Tokyo! However, most of our trip was spent on the train, so we didn't see too much and I didn't get any pictures. Next time, though!
Thursday was rainy, so we didn't go out except to make a trip to the store for dinner.

Yesterday, we decided to go see where Cinnamon will have to meet for her race on Sunday, so we headed out to the middle of nowhere. Okay, so really it was just about 25 minutes outside of Tokyo in Shimomaruko. It definitely had a small town feel to it that Cinnamon said reminded her of Florida. But we went the wrong way and didn't find the place, and since it wasn't on the train station map, we decided to just head back.

So we stopped off at Den-en Chofu!

It had a very upscale feel to it, with lots of nice, big houses, but not much in the way of shopping.

But it did have this place - the Sanrio Strawberry House! The building was actually shaped like a big strawberry! So we went inside, but they didn't have as much stuff as the Sanrio shop in Ginza. I figured a giant strawberry could fit a lot more things in it, but I was sadly mistaken. Still made for an interesting experience.

After that, we did a little shopping in Meguro where Cinnamon bought a few t-shirts at the Uniqlo before we headed home for the evening.

Today, in a few hours we're going to Tennouzu Isle to see our very first *pnish* show and I am beyond excited. (*pnish* is a 4-man theatre group who is best known for their combination of acting, comedy and dance skills). This particular play is called Samurai Mode, and I don't know too much of what it's about, but I know there's swordfighting. It promises to be a fun evening~