Today we wanted to see if we could find some furniture for our apartment instead of going to Mt. Takao. Fiirst we wanted to go to one of the famous flea markets in Tokyo near Yoyogi park. We did not expect any furniture there, but were just curious of what would be sold there and who knows, maybe we could find something unexpected. While on our way to the subway the bus to Shibuya just arrived in our street. Because we never took the bus before we decided to go to Shubuya by bus. It was very interesting to see the neighborhood and what kind of stores and neighborhood placed on the way of the bus. When we arrived near Yoyogi we first saw a market with all kinds of fresh food and spices. It was a professionally setup so we knew this could not be the flea market. After we passed this market we discovered the flea market was behind the first market. It was very interesting to see what people sold. Mostly it was clothes but sometimes you could discover some other stuff as well, like CD's DVD's and occasionally some games. There were even some people selling very nice drinking cups (Japan made) that we bought. After the market we sat down on a stone wall to eat our cream puffs we bought at the bus station and then we continued our way to a new furniture shop called Isetan. To get there we walked a part of Yoyogi park and it was a lot of fun. Many people were practicing dances on music and there were even some activities especially for kids. We even saw some guy practicing throwing bottles for cocktails, as often seen in the movies. The rest of the park was beautiful as well. There were a lot of trees which were colored beautifully because of the autumn en we enjoyed them very much too. On our way out we even saw a big performance with acrobats on a tower of chairs which was very enjoying to watch.

On our way to Isetan we walked trough the shopping district of Harajuku. It was so much fun, there were all kinds of shops and it is quite nice to see them all together. You had normal and very exclusive clothes or lingerie stores and even a shop with dog clothes (the dragon outfit was soooo cute). There was also a big row in the street for the newest single or cd of a teenage group duo. The streets were very busy but luckily we had no trouble to get through them. Halfway our route we took the metro, there were no stores around after Harajuku and it was a lot faster.

When we finally arrived at Isetan we unfortunately discovered it was more expensive then the shop were we bought our beds (iDC). That was quite unexpected and we could not find any furniture in our price range. We did enjoy some other stuff they sold as well. We even found a pair of slippers for Dennis. They also sold specially prepared flowered which do not whither and were arranged in the most beautiful ways. These flowers may have looked cheap compared to what fresh flowers normally cost in Tokyo. But for us it was still too much to pay! After Iseatan we tried Maruichi (their sign says OIOI, so we often call it oi-oi) in Shibuya. This store should have furniture but after some searching we discovered the stores with the furniture were not in Shinjuku. When we tried find something to eat, that was more easily said then done. The problem was that we did not know were to look. All restaurants were in high buildings and most menus were only in Japanese and no pictures except of how exclusive the inside looked... We did not want to go to a junk food restaurant so we eventually went underground and found ourselves some restaurants with plastic examples outside and pictures in the menus. We had ourselves a Tokyo style hamburger. Afterwards we went to the Yodobashi stores to check some prices of eclectric appliances we are now renting to get an idea how much everything costs. Afterwards we finally went home and recover from this very hectic an busy day.