+ First trip to Tokyo: Shibuya & Shinjuku!

I am back with more updates about my stay in Japan! ^^

I am sorry it´s late again >.< Since school started properly over here, time has been limited!

Anyway, I wanted to take you back to the time when I first arrived, just a bit under a month ago.

The very second day we stayed here (around the 5th of September?), I and a classmate decided to head into Tokyo to explore a bit! Now, she is a "Japan-veteran" (as in, she has been to Japan on several occations, and even studied here for a longer period of time also!), she took on the job of showing me around a bit (something I am very greatful for ^^).

Ofcourse, we were both pretty jet-lagged after the long journey, so I acctually requested that we´d visit Shibuya and Shinjuku on the first day (satuday) because I wanted to be a bit more sprightly for such an endeavour as going to Harajuku. 

So yeah, we somehow managed to find the way to the local train-station, and figured out how to read the map of train-routes that was exclusively written in kanji (ehehe ^^"), and soon we were on our way, with the 12 o´clock train!

It takes about 1 hour and 45 min to go the entire way to Shibuya from where we started off, so we had to change trains a few times, and spent a lot of time people-viewing while we did so! ^^

When we finally came there, we had gone by the Yamanote-line from Tokyo-mainstation, so we arrived just by the Hachiko-exit in Shibuya! This meant we came right out into the famous Shibuya-square as soon as we left the train-station.

(We were quite surprised to see a cat lying on the famous Hachiko statue haha ^^)

Our main goal in Shibuya was to explore "Maru-kyu" (or Shibuya 109 as the building says), so we headed there first.

I was so baffled by the fact that this shopping-mall has 8 floors exclusively for clothing and cute accessories, so I took quite a few pictures!

 

 The brand "Ruby-Rose" was sooo cuuute ;V; 

 

 

 

 Little Twin-stars stuff at the Hello-Kitty shop TT 0 TT

 

 We laughed a bit by the name of this store haha ^^

 

Liz-Lisa <3

I am not sure how much time we spent just walking around and looking, but it surely was well over an hour, perhaps two haha... Since we are both students and since we both had just arrived, none of us bought anything. We decided to spend the day browsing and just enjoying the views ^^

After leaving "Maru-kyu", we walked around some more, visited the local Forever 21 and a huuuge CD and DVD shop that had 9 floors, that also had a floor exclusively for manga! It was my first meeting with a so-called typical Japanese manga-shop and the share amount of manga kind of blew my mind!

After this we decided to head over to Shinjuku for a while! By then, it was already starting to get a bit late acctually.

The Yamanote-line is a circle line that goes around all the "famous" places in Tokyo, and the trains are marked with their green colour, so they are pretty easy to find ^^ We took it onwards a few stops to get to Shinjuku!

We had originally planned to visit the makeup store "E-tude-house" in Shinjuku, since my friend knew about a shop nearby the trainstation, but it happend to have moved, so we were a bit bummed by that, especially since we spent some time searching...

after a while though, we decided to get some dinner, and since I was "the new one there" I was able to choose! ^^ We tried out this thing called "Okonomiyaki"! 

Basically, the resturant you enter has tables with a hot-plate in the middle. You order some base ingredients from a menu, and you can order an extra with it. 

I went with a vegetable mix with an extra egg, and my friend did a chicken and cheese mix (but we split both)

 As you can see, it´s then up to you to fry the "pancake-omelette" by yourself (calling it that because that sort of is how it seems? haha)

 

Afterwards, you add some toppings (my friend tought me how to do it properly) and then it´s ready! ^^ It was a really fun experience to make it and personally I think it´s a really nice idea! 

When we had finished, we decided that perhaps it was time to head back home again. We both wanted to stop by Starbucks first though, so we headed out into the street to search for one close by.

While we did so, we happend to stumble upon a game arcade!

 

We didn´t play any crane-games, but we did try out a drumming game that was really fun ^^ I didn´t take any pictures of that though, I was too distracted by the amazingly cute korohamus *v*
One day....

Finally, we found a Starbucks-place, and I knew exactly what I wanted to try.

What can you find only in the Japan - Starbucks?

Matcha-Frappuchinos ♡ 7 ♡!
(they drew a cute little frog for me ahhh ; v; hihi)

So, with both a frappuchino each (my friend got vanilla-flavoured), we decided it was time to head home.
It had been a looong day, and we were both quite tired still from jet-lag.
We also had quite a schedule the next day (planning to go to Harajuku and everything) so we decided it was a good idea to try and get some sleep. 

I´ll let you in on a secret though, I was SO jet-lagged I could hardly sleep for 4-5 days @_@...

Yeah,

well, that was my first experience with Tokyo! ^^ SO many first-time-achievements were done that day! I visited Shibuya and Shinjuku for the first time, I saw a lot of well known brand-stores for the first time, I visited my first manga-shop, I tasted "Okonomiyaki" for the first time (haven´t since acctually), I visited and played a game at a game-arcade and I even tried a Matcha-Frappuchino! I truly felt like I could cross of loads of things from my mental-checklist haha ^^

I hope you enjoyed this entry!
Please comment below if you have any questions
or just want to say something!

Film review: Picnic at Hanging Rock

This past year I have grown to love movies to an extend that one of my top visited webpages is imdb, and my "to-watch" list is just too long. Watching less anime and more movies and english-language series has been a weird transition also... 

Don´t worry though! I still watch anime, and I am still interested in it all, I just feel a personal growth over the past year, stemming from moving out on my own for the first time, I am sure haha ^^

I wanted to reccomend a nice movie for all of you to check out because sometimes you just need to watch a good movie that makes you feel calm and makes you think. Being it the nice aesthetics, music, scenery or just actors that attracted me to the movie in the first place differs very much from movie to movie. This one might be old, but I would definitely reccomend giving it a watch!

 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) 

 

I wanted to write about this movie because I am rather obsessed by the urban-legend storyline connected with it. It is about an all-girls boarding school in Victoria, Australia, called Applegate hall, and their picnic-outing on st. Valentines day in the year 1900 by the foot of a hill called Hanging Rock. The movie starts with the girls getting ready in the morning of the picnic, reading eachothers St. Valentines day letters and fawning over their muslin dresses. These scenes are truly beautiful. Once they leave the school ,in a chariot that carries all of them in one go, they chat merrily about their excursion all the way up to their destination place, which is the nearby hilled area known as Hanging Rock. There they eat cake, and toast for St. Valentine, and have a lovely time in the serene woodland scenery, with delightful classical music setting the perfect feeling. 

The teachers soon find out all their clocks have stopped, making it hard to find out when they need to go back again for the promised dinner in the evening, with the headmistress. Soon three of the senior girls decide to wander up to the hillside for some school-related research,  accompanied by one of the younger girls. They promise to only be gone for a short while. They begin feeling weird as they wander through the lower passages of the mountain side, and the youngest girl begins to feel frightend. Suddenly the three elder ones wander off into the mountain, leaving the youngest one behind, screaming. She runs away in share terror of their strange behaviour. And since then... the girls dissapear, never to be found again! 

 

 

 

 

This is a movie based on a novel that came out in 1967 (that I am currently reading!) written by the Australian author Joan Lindsay, who claims that it might either be reality or fiction. Since then there have been countless amounts of people researching the story, trying to find proof for the existence of the people involved, and the school in discussion. One thing is for certain, Hanging Rock has always been a mystical place that people seem to connect weird happenings to! 

The rest of the movie, after the dissaperance of the girls, is about the struggle of the people left behind and their suffering. The scenes are very dream-like and the music combined with the sceneries makes for a very delirious sort of feeling to it. No wonder this has been deemed perhaps the first popular cult-movie from Australia! A must see! 

I hope you enjoyed this entry,

please comment below!