Trip to Ikebukuro

it´s been around 9 months since I updated here, wow...

The explanation would take ages, so I will shortly summarize :

I experienced a mental breakdown in November that I couldn´t get over until I finally got my summer vacation, because I never got a long enough brake to acctually deal with it until summer came around.

Another sad cricumstance: my phone had a stupid accident, so I lost all the pictures I took in Japan after the end of October... so yeah... it will be pretty hard to show the things I did there... 

However! I plan on making two more updates about my trip. 

It will be this one, which is about the trip I took to Ikebukuro,

and I will make a little entry about the trip we made to the local Shinto Shrine and Buddhist Temple in the area I lived in, in Japan :-) 

Just so everyone knows, I am back in Norway now, and I have been since February started! 

I decided to make the explanation about all of this as short as possible, because I don´t like writing apology after apology every time I update this blog.  If you wonder about any details, please don´t hesitate to ask, but know that this is a sensitive subject to me, so I might not be able to answer completely to your satisfaction...

I am chronically ill, so my updating will always be irradic, and after almost 9 years of living with it, I guess it´s time I realize that I can´t promise anything. I have to live day by day and see how it goes...

BUT NOW! 

It´s been a long time, So I might now remember everything completely correctly,
but I will shortly talk about what I did in Ikebukuro
back in the 9th of September 2015:

I don´t know if I have told any of you, but I do have a japanese friend called Ayuko!
She is a year older than me and I met her when she was an exhange student in Norway a year before I went to Japan! So it´s sort of funny: we´ve both been able to show eachother around our own country hehe. Because actually, it was entirely Ayukos doing that we went to Ikebukuro in the first place!
I just wanted to meet up with her, since it was so long since we´d met, but I left it up to her to decide where, since she knows more about the city she lives in than I do. 

The day I headed out to meet Ayuko, there was a thyphoon in Tokyo, which basically means that the sky decideds to turn into a literal waterfall, and it rained more than I´ve ever experienced in my life, without there being an actual storm. 

I however, didn´t have boots or anything, and I figured since there was no wind I could just as well wear a simple, cute outfit, wearing my canvas slip-on shoes... oh boy did I get drenched that day!

Before that though, we managed to do a lot of interesting things!
After meeting me at the Ikebukuro subway, Ayuko showed me the Sanrio gift store!
Those stores are dangerous when you´re a poor student with a weakness towards kawaii hehe ^^"

She surprised me by then taking me to a really cute café with a galaxy theme!
It was called
The Milkyway Café

In Japan they have amazingly life-like plastic replicas of the food they serve outside of many different restaurants and cafés!

They had SO many cute cakes, parfaits and other cute dishes, also even savoury ones that still looked cute! I think Ayuko had a curry dish with star shaped fried cutlets and rice + greens, but I could not resist the temptation to try out something cute, since I tried to think that I probably wouldn´t have the chance to go there again (which I was correct in!) 

I went with the "Taurus"-parfait in their "Constallation desert" series!

(Fun fact: my star-sign isn´t even Taurus, I just liked the design hehe)

It had vanilla icecream with matcha cream, dango, sweet cookies and even a dorayaki and extra red bean paste with a caramel-sauce drizzle on top! Basically the prettiest desert I´ve probably ever had in my life, and I only managed to eat about half haha xD

After this, Ayuko showed me the famous "Animedia"-shop, which is a chain-store that sells manga and anime goods. The special thing was that their main-shop happend to be located in Ikebukuro! Basically a shop that had 9 floors only dealing with anime and manga, and I was completely awed to say the least... Also forgot about taking pictures in my excitement >_>"""

Lastly, we visited Sunshine-city, which was good, because by then my feet were so wet and cold that I could have needed some sunshine by then. The rain was furiously pouring down harsher by the hour, so by the time we had got around to go in there, which was one of our last stops of the day, the rain-water was litterary splashing up from the streets!  

For those of you who doesn´t know, Sunshine-city is a big shopping mall with loads of different shops and many floors. In there we stopped by a lovely Studio Ghibli Shop, and even though my  phone was almost dying, I just HAD to get a last couple of pictures.

I even managed to get one of my outfit for the day!

Please don´t mind my hair being totally killed by the humidity, and also overlook the fact that my clothes are so plain, I was struggling a lot with self-confidence at the time and didn´t want to attract to much attention. Oh, and if not exactly wet, most of my clothes were atleast moist at the time from the weather, so I.... I really don´t know why I even bothered posting this image in the first place haha XD 

And a selfie with the lovely Ayuko! <3 

She is such a beauty <3 ah, just writing this makes me miss her >_<

We had been looking around ALL day from around noon until 7 pm, so after a quick little warm drink and a bite to eat, we decided to part ways. A day with Ayuko is always fun, and I still remember our first outing in Tokyo with loads of happy memories. Typically I forgot about taking pictures since we were so busy all day, and most of the ones I took was sadly not of a quality that I would be comfortable posting ^^"

Anyway, that was the end of my Ikebukuro adventure! ^^

I hope you enjoyed this long-overdue little update about some of my adventures as a exchange-student in Japan! I am really impressed that you guys are still sticking around even though I can´t update as much as I probably should... thank you all for being so patient and lovely, and thanks for all the nice comments you send me, they really warm my heart and keep me encouraged to keep up the work with this blog! <3 

+ 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!