Ben got an early start each day while I took longer to wake up. He usually walked around our neighborhood and ate a local-style breakfast. Here’s some photos he sent me from this morning:
I had a 10am cafe reservation in Harajuku. We had a couple hours to kill before then so we went o Shibuya before the crowds arrived. When we arrived at the famous scramble I was sure we were in the wrong place. It was so small! Ben found the Hachiko dog memorial and confirmed that indeed this was the famous Shibuya scramble. Not so impressive without crowds!
We popped into a konbini for drinks and curry bun before looking for nearby shrines.
Next stop was Harajuku.
It was too early for shops, so we walked and looked. We took some truly cursed photos at the Purikura booth shop where the noisiness was on another level!
More peaceful wandering:
The time has come . . . for the pop-up Seventeen Cafe!! Yes, I got to attend a real k-pop collab cafe for my FAVORITE group!
The cafe was running from May to July this year. It was very difficult to purchase tickets. The websites were all in Japanese and required a Japan-specific web account from hubsynch, which required a Japanese phone and address entered in a specific way that was hard for us to figure out (our local pal Koichi got on video chat to help spot errors!).
After all of that I was nearly turned away at the door when I couldn’t login to load my reservation live on the site! Luckily the cafe worker kindly took my email confirmation and my passport and compared it to their list. It really looked like I was going to be denied at first and I was panicking so hard. But we got in!!!
The cafe soon filled up – mostly middle-aged women. It was so surreal to see them comparing their card pulls, talking about the group, seeing the group members as their phone lock screens. I saw some show off merch they bought at the recent dome tour in Japan (that’s why the pop-up shop occurred). I tried to make small talk, comments to invite conversation, but was brushed off. So I was surprised to see my neighbor pose for the selfie! I laughed and got her permission to keep the photo.
After eating, if you still had time in your reservation allotment, you could browse and purchase merchandise. I spent too much money – I blame their blind pack system! I wanted to be sure I got a couple favorites and I DID, so it was worth it đŸ˜‰
Day 2 will be continued in a later post. We did so much and it was barely 11 am!
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