Gotta Catch 'Em All!

Last Tuesday, Cinnamon and I went to Hamamatsucho (pronounced Haw-ma-motts-cho) because that's where the Tokyo Pokemon Center is! Believe it or not, Cinnamon was the one who wanted to go. I had no idea there was such a place until she told me about it.



This is looking back toward Hamamatsucho station from the second floor of the building housing the Pokemon Center.



Doesn't she look happy to be here? She's standing just to the right of the entrance in front of three very inviting pokemon.



And this is what you see right as you walk in--pokemon everywhere! They have all sorts of pokemon merchandise for sale here...



...from puppets (and a really dorky picture of me, I might add)...



...to dolls and plush blankets. Apparently they're really pushing this "onemuri (sleeping) Pikachu." He was all over the place.



They even had a mini hotcake pan for those of you whose hotcakes just aren't pokemon-ish enough. There were a lot more things in the store--pins, notebooks, lunchboxes, candy, rice bowls, t-shirts, and of course the video games, but I'm sure you're probably sick of all this merchandise by now, right? Well, most of you are, I don't doubt.

After leaving the Pokemon Center, we made the sound decision to... walk aimlessly, as we usually do. Cinnamon thought we should walk toward Roppongi, so we started off in the direction of Tokyo Tower.



Here we are walking down the street. Good times.



Hey, look what we found by Zozoji Temple--it's Tokyo Tower!



These crazed-looking girls are actually pointing at the flowers on the tree, but it's hard to see in the low lighting.

As it turns out, we ended up in the complete opposite direction from Roppongi, in the middle of... not much. This seems to happen to us a lot.



...But here's a cute water pipe cover thing!

We started off at Daimon station (which is right next door to Hamamatsucho). We then walked past Onarimon, Toranomon, and Shinbashi station before we came to Ginza.



This is Ginza. It's the swanky part of town. We passed no less than three Tiffany & Co. stores, plus all sorts of other high end places like Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, and the posh Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi. 



While on our walk, we also passed no less than 8 Starbucks cafes. We didn't stop at any of them, but this is a picture of the sakura drink I mentioned earlier. I fully intend to get another one before we leave Japan. We also passed 10 Doutor coffee shops, 6 Cafe Veloce, 4 Tully's, 4 Excelsior Cafes, and 3 Cafe de Crie. Those are all coffee shops, of course. And they're very prominent in Tokyo, in that you can hardly go a block or two without seeing one. 

We ended up at Kyobashi station, a full 3 miles away from where we started. Then we hopped on the Ginza line and went to Aoyama-Itchome (pronounced Ah-o-yaw-ma Ee-cho-may). We had a quick dinner at McDonald's and headed home afterward, as it was "late" by Japan standards (so... about 8pm), and my stomach was bothering me. 

Next up--more meat!