Harajuku, Yoyogi Park - Sunday

On Sunday, we did a Ferrante-LoCicero joint trip to Harajuku, a brief train ride from Ebisu ("our" station) up the Yamanote line. The Harajuku station is one of the smallest and most poorly laid out, and on the weekends, the crowds make the area near gridlock!

Harajuku has several major attractions such as Meiji-Jingu temple, Yoyogi Park (equivalent to Central Park of New York) and Takeshita-dori, a gathering place for teens and the young hip crowd (Meagan would surely have enjoyed this). Very near the station, teens dress up and display themselves for pictures and "Free Hugs" and people really seem to be drawn to it. Most of the young girls dress in what I call the "Little Bo Peep" costumes with frilly skirts, bows in their hair, longs socks and ballet slippers, but the variety is endless.

The main street is a beautiful tree lined boulevard with plenty of shopping. There were fast food joints (Wendy's was packed), pottery, jewelry, and all varieties of the fashion spectrum. We had a quick, tasty lunch at Pizza Express, which was fantastic (I think we've eaten more pizza than sushi). Unfortunately, little Andrew was out of sorts and unconsolable (Deanna's vocab), so Deanna had to take him home early. The rest of us went to the Oriental Bazaar, a shop with great pottery and other oriental stuff. We are looking at buying a set of dishes, tea cups and the like to bring back to the States to remind us of our trip.

Afterward, we strolled down to Yoyogi-Koen to see the sites. We passed many street vendors selling food, which always gains my interest. I was wondering how the food varies by location, especially street vendors, because to a foreigner, much of the stuff looks the same. Michael explained that the types of food (dumplings, skewered meat, etc) are fairly consistent in the basic ingrediants from location to location, while I thought it would vary with every vendor.

In the park we observed the traditional family units picnicing, couples strolling hand-in-hand, fathers and sons playing catch, and whole familes with a vollying a vollyball. There were numerous street performers playing instruments ranging from bongos to ukelele's. The group playing ukeleles (10-15 people) were playing the song "Downtown", which we thought was pretty cool, so we stopped and did a little sing-along. There was a group of people doing a skit, folks playing the traditional 3-stringed guitar (name not known), and some rock bands. Also noted a group doing a martial arts thing with wooden swords (I think it's called kendo?) where they line up on opposite sides and make charges toward each other in mock battle.


Emilia and Anthony fed crushed pretzels to tiny fish in a pool near a bench where we sat while we listened to some bongo players. The pool was very dirty, as was the rest of the park, but I can truly say that his was the only spot I've seen that wasn't very clean. We headed back to the Ferrante Ranch after watching a bit of "The Basketball Man Show" (another street performer) while Michael and Emilia went on to do some shopping.