Shinjuku Nishiguchi + Omotesando

Today was one of those days we planned to take it a little easy. That didn't exactly work out the way I intended. For some reason I woke up at around 7:30 and decided that this was perfect timing to open a bank account right around when the banks opened. Citibank was really far and an epic fail but it's one of the few places you can reliably withdraw from US bank accounts.

After some research, I found out that Shinsei Bank is really the best option. They didn't speak English at the Shinjuku branch, but opening the account in Japanese wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. Regardless, I am super proud of myself. Unfortunately, for some reason I can't actually use my bank account for a week; so I'll have to rely on withdrawing cash from our US accounts til then.

For lunch we ventured out to the west side of Shinjuku, Shinjuku Nishiguchi - 新宿西口. This area is primarily occupied by banks and government buildings including the famous Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. There's really nothing special inside the twin towers and we didn't bother with the skydeck, but it looked exactly how it's supposed to look. Ok, so we basically walked towards it, took this picture, and walked away.

The first thing we consumed today was of course bubble tea! V took a nice long drink from the Coconut Milk, laughed a little hard and said, "Really bad." It really was surprisingly subpar. Right in the middle of Shinjuku Nishiguchi are a couple blocks of restaurants and small stores. I think they exist to satisfy business lunch demand and some local residents. Soba for lunch nearby was cost something like 800 Yen for both of us combined. 美味しい! 高くない! It's possible to eat cheap in Tokyo by the way.

Back to Omotesando to fix our cell phones. This went pretty well and in decent moods we decided to continue up the hill. Omotesando is one of the luxury shopping streets in Tokyo and stretches from Harajuku to Aoyama. At least I think it does. The street is famous for its architecture including the Tod's store, Prada store, and Omotesando Hills, below. Omotesando Hills isn't quite as cool as it looks in this picture, but you can walk from the top to the bottom in a giant spiral. I felt that the design was noteworthy but the building was just too compact overall to be inspiring at all. Didn't quite live up to the hype.

Somewhere in here we were supposed to take a break, but we ended up heading to dinner to meet some other Waseda students in Takadanobaba. Takadanobaba is a collegetown populated by the students of a collection of universities, mine included. I'm totally glad we decided not to live there. We're totally at a point in our lives where we've outgrown the collegetown atmosphere.

Sooner or later, V and I need a break from these jam packed days. Tomorrow is not going to be that day...

Housing update: It goes poorly. =( Super tired of living in a hotel.