shopping in Tokyo

The shopping here is incredible. Every single corner of the city has huge buildings of endless stores.  Each of the many department stores have 12 floors each.  There is no way to see it all....but we tried. The only problem is that the people here are so tiny, they didn't have our sizes in many of the stores.

We loved visiting Harajuku.  There are many interesting and fun people here.

In Harajuku, there was a fun kids toy store that Andrew loved.  They had an entire line of toy bullet trains.  He chose to spend some of his souvenir money on them.

In that same store they sold these pouches.  I thought what they wrote on the package was funny. "This pouch has many functions.  Napkin, underwear, PET bottle, cosmetics, ice bag."  They thought of everything!

A completely different shopping area was the Nakamise shopping street on the way to the Sensoji Temple.  There are just rows and rows of souvenirs crowded into little shops.

Ali loved all the cute little socks they have all over.

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At the end of the shopping street, we enjoyed a quick (and extremely hot) visit to the temple.

I love the pagodas.

I enjoyed myself at the next shopping area - the Kappabashi Kitchenware Town.  There are rows and rows of restaurant supply stores and kitchen tools.  Everything from wholesale chopsticks to industrial mixers and menu boards

Loved the themed building with coffee mugs on the side.

This store was really cool.  It has fake food that all the restaurants use in their window displays.  They are so realistic!  We thought it would be fun to buy something there, but they are actually really expensive.

Grilled meat and veggies.

Ramen and fried rice.

Curries and noodles.

Look how real that meat looks!

I found some fun things for my kitchen.

There are Japanese dishes, bowls and teapots everywhere.

I thought it was funny in the grocery stores to see all of the asian foods.  We usually have a small section of asian food along with mexican, etc.  Here there are rows and rows of asian food (obviously) but no other sections from other countries.

Ahh.... the stationary stores.  We love the stationary stores.  Rows and rows of pens, notebooks and beautiful stationary.

Yes, we enjoyed shopping and now we must check our bags on the airplane so we can carry it all on.