Sayonara Japan

Here we are finally, for they last day of my family's trip to Japan. I managed to milk it for about 10 blog posts, so I'm definitely happy. It was a great vacation, so there's that, too.

The last day for me was rounding up a few odds and ends. The rest of my family left two days later, but I still needed find some souveniers to spend the rest of the yen I had in my pocket. We also never got a chance to see any of the crazy dressing Harajuku girls, so the family trotted out to Harajuku because it's also home to an Oriental Bazaar where souveniers could be had.

Unfortunately, being New Years, the Oriental Bazaar was not open, and once again none of the Harajuku girls were out. This was a pretty big bummer, but we found a few things to do. First we went to check out a place called Meiji Jingu in Harajuku which is a shrine to emporer Meiji. Since it was New Years, this place was ridiculously crowded. Ahem, see below.

We walked along with the crowd close to the temple, then decided to turn back again since we weren't sure what to do when we actually got to the temple and it would have taken forever. This is a wall of lanterns we saw along the way, I'm not really sure what their meaning is though.

This place was home to a souvenier shop, which we did check out. This was my jackpot because they had just about everything I wanted as far as gifts from Japan go. I managed to blow most of the rest of my wad of cash at the place. Heading back to the subway, we ran into this group of four girls in traditional Japanese outfits. They were super nice.

We had our last family meal together for at least 6 months at this really good okonomiyaki restaurant I'll talk more about in a future food post. Here's a photo of the fam anyway:

Since we were there in Harajuku, which has a ridiculous concentration of ice cream crepe stands, we decided to see what the big deal was about.

In short, I recommend. Mine was something filled with custard, chocolate, bananas, and whipped cream. Kelsey enjoyed her's, too:

That was the end for me as we headed off to the subway station to say goodbye. A Japanese girl nicely took this photo of the family:

A quick goodbye to limit tears, and I was on my way out of Japan.

My trip back was a bit ridiculous, I got to the airport just in time even though I arrived two hours early. It was a big travel day and there was a big pileup at the check in counter. I made it to my plane about half an hour before it took off, so that was OK. I made it to the Korean airport where I realized that I had forgotten my Korean ID card, so I was really nervous about making it through immigration. This ended up not being a deal at all, so that was OK, too.

I next took the subway to the bus station where the last bus to my town had left about an hour before I got there. This meant I was going to spend the night in a spa under the bus terminal. I took a shower there, which was nice, but the sleeping room was like torture. It was about 90 degrees in there so I was sweating and these guys kept making a bunch of noise. They kept sighing in their sleep like madmen everytime I was close to sleeping, so I didn't sleep a lot. I caught the 6:30 a.m. bus to my town, which was even worse than the spa. It was really really hot on the bus, and due to the amount of snow falling the trip took 3 and a quarter hours as opposed to the 1:30 it is supposed to take. Just torture. It was nice to be home, anyway.

Stay tuned for my last two posts about Japan. One will be about the souveniers I bough and another about the food.