Tokyo, Day 6 – Ikebukuro Shopping and Surprises

Since we didn’t make any plans for this day and the weather wouldn’t be so great, we decided to go to Closet Child in Ikebukuro. The breakfast the day before had been so great, that we decided to go to the same little shop to get some nice things. We left the hotel a little later, since we didn’t need to get breakfast before ten, so we snapped a picture of the big clock at 11:05 am. We went to Shinjuku Station, to the shop called ‘Tap House’ and bought ourselves some nice treats.

My dad’s plate on the left, my plate on the right. This time we both took
a cup with fruit, cake and whipped cream.
Then, we went on our way to Ikebukuro.
Ikebukuro Station was quite big, but since I had collected information about shops in Ikebukuro too, I knew we needed to find the Sunshine City exit. It took us a while to find it, but after following some signs we took an escalator up and found ourselves in a busy street.
We were quite hungry and decided to eat some of our rolls, while we looked at the people passing by. I expected Ikebukuro to be a quiet district (I don’t know why), but it was really crowded. It was a Saturday of course, but still.
We finished our food and walked into a big street, where I saw a colourful shopfront: Sanrio!

The shop was both on the in- and outside so colourful and cute!
Of course we had to go inside! I’ll be honest, I thought Sanrio was all about Hello Kitty, but was I wrong! I saw a lot of familiar looking animals and characters, but I never really realized they were from Sanrio! The merchandise the shop sold was beyond cute and I could have spent at least an hour just looking around.

Don’t I look fashionable?
They had everything, from bags to pencilcases and from stuffed animals to umbrellas. Heaven for any Sanrio-lover!
We left the store again and continued our search for Closet Child. We crossed a big Book-off (Remember that name? It’s a store that sells any possible manga!) and many, many machines to win stuffed animals.

I was in serious love with those lamas!
After buying a Coca Cola Zero from a rainbow-coloured vending machine, we went left and walked into a bit of a deserted street. According to my map, Closet Child was in this street, but apparently I had read it wrong, since we had to go one street back. Then, I finally saw a Starbucks (this was the first time I was happy to see one) and saw the Closet Child sign in the window above it!

It took a while to find it, so I was happy to see the
four dressed mannequins behind the window!
We walked into a small hallway and went up to the third floor with an elevator (which had a poster inside of things you shouldn’t do inside an elevator, it was very funny). When we got out, we walked through an open door and found ourselves in quite a big room filled with shelves and tables with CDs. All the clothes were to the right. I wasn’t really interested in music at that moment, so we walked up to the dresses right away.

Closet Child Ikebukuro doesn’t only sell clothes and CDs,
but also dolls, as you can see behind me.
I have to be honest: I was very disappointed by what Angelic Pretty and Baby, the Stars Shine Bright dresses they had to offer. They had only a few AP pieces and only a little more Baby. Although this is the biggest Closet Child, I think it’s mainly directed at Gothic and punk-style and far less at Sweet and Classic, since there were a lot of black clothes. The dresses they did offer were none of my taste, so I was afraid I wouldn’t buy anything. Suddenly, my dad pointed at a rack of coats and I noticed a light pink coloured coat with borders of white fur. I pulled it out of the rack and it was a beautiful Angelic Pretty coat with an embroidered pony on it. Of course, I had to try it on, with and without a petticoat!

It was quite hot inside with the big coat on!
Oh my God, I fell in love with the gorgeous coat! My dad also showed me an oldfashioned pink coat by Innocent World, but when I tried it on he said he highly preferred the Angelic Pretty one. While I browsed the shop a little more, my dad guarded the coat with his life (there were two other, beautiful Lolitas in the store, but I didn’t want to give the gorgeous coat to them)!
I also noticed some bloomers and although I wanted a white pair, I chose a pink pair, since the white one was offbrand, the pink one Baby, the Stars Shine Bright. I’m turning into a brandwhore! Whaaah! XD
I tried the pink one on in the shop, just under my skirt, but of course I should have mentioned to the staff I wanted to try it on, so I could use the changing room. So they took it from me for a moment (I felt really stupid, I was just so excited to find such lovely bloomers)! After choosing a pink Melty Chocolate ring, I said I wanted to buy the bloomers, so they gave it back to me (pfew! XD) and I bought the coat too (after doubting between the coat and a lovely pink Angelic Pretty capelet). I received such a big bag!

A purchase from Closet Child Ikebukuro after all! I was so happy…
We walked back to the big Book-off we had seen, where I bought a pile of Japanese manga, both for myself and as a birthday present for my friend Tia-chan. It was interesting to ask the shop staff where I could find the manga I was looking for, since there were so many books with unreadable titles! I was glad I knew all the titles in Japanese too! And it felt really cool to ask for ‘Hagane no Renkinjutsushi’ or ‘Hanazakari no Kimitachi e’. ^^

Reading Japanese people everywhere again.
We left the Book-off again, after which my dad browsed another shop while I waited outside (the mosquito bites started to really itch and ache again, my poor legs…). After that, we walked back outside and looked around us. We didn’t know much about Ikebukuro and I didn’t really think we were going to spend much more time there. I only knew about this big centre called ‘Sunshine City’ and that there was an observation deck there, so we decided to go check it out. We didn’t know we would spend the rest of our day there..!

The underground way to Sunshine City.
We had to take an underground way to Sunshine City, since it was on the other side of the road. I saw several posters of the Sunshine Aquarium, but I didn’t think we would go there. We crossed several cute shops, including one that sold some adorable mobile phone straps. They turned out to be from Paris Kid’s and they were just too cute! After that, we went on our way too find the observation deck we had heard about. When we found the elevators, two ladies in elegant outfits showed us the way to the elevator and bowed for us until the doors closed. As soon as the elevator started to move, the lights turned off and the elevator turned dark blue, while the walls showed stars and constellations while dreamy music was playing. A screen showed us how fast the elevator was going.

The elevator went so fast!
When we arrived upstairs (the 60th floor!), a man in a neat suit showed us the way to the ticket vending lady. Just when we wanted to pay, I noticed a small text saying that combined tickets, observation deck and aquarium, were cheaper, so I told my dad about it. Before I knew it, he bought two combined tickets! After paying, we were allowed to enjoy the view over Tokyo at 251 meters!

You can see the Shinjuku Skyscrapers we could see from our hotelwindow!
Although the weather wasn’t too great, the view was amazing! We spent so much time just looking around at the city. You could see from every side of the building, so we walked around and looked at some posters with pictures on it from what you could see.

My dad enjoyed looking around so much! He kept pointing at things and taking pictures.
I noticed a door that led to some stairs. When we walked up the stairs, we found ourselves outside on the top of the building, at 256 meters high! The view was even greater from up there and I used a binocular multiple times.

The binoculars worked so extremely well! I could even read
small signs (if I could read Japanese, that is).
After a while, we left the observation deck again (with the superfast elevator of course) and continued our way to the aquarium. After asking the way to a lovely lady (who spoke a little English, yay!) and walking quite a while, we saw some people in Hawaii shirts directing people towards a queue and we understood we had found the line to the aquarium. After waiting for a short while, some of the Hawaii shirts (XD) led a group of people, including us, to an elevator. While the elevator started to move upstairs, a girl in a Hawaii shirt looked at my dress and smiled, indicating that she liked it. When we got out, she smiled again and complimented me (I felt so honoured ^^). When we walked around a corner, there was a huge line in front of the ticketbooths! I was so glad we had bought our tickets already!

Sunshine Aquarium! I really had no idea what to expect.
We followed a path that led into the building, where the aquarium officially started. Now I’ll have to be honest: describing the aquarium is quite hard. There were so many basins with sea animals that it is impossible to tell you everything. Plus, it was very crowded. So crowded that we sometimes walked in lines past all the windows. I’ll try my best to tell as much as I can, but forgive me when I jump too much in my story. ^^’
Well, as I said: it was very crowded. A lot of people had decided to visit the aquarium that day, most of them with kids. Maneuvering between all the people with my huge Closet Child bag was quite a challenge, but I managed to survive! It was very dark inside, so you could see the fish and other animals really well (of course).

One of the many beautiful basins. So many colours and fish!
After a few windows I saw something that scared me quite a lot: it was a basin with two huge Japanese spider crabs in them!

I hope I don’t scare people with this! They were so big…
After squeezing myself through the mass of people somehow, I managed to get a good look at the huge crabs. They were gigantic! A bit too big for my taste…
In the basin next to it lived another animal that I also found very scary: the biggest octopus I’ve ever seen!

I don’t know which I found creepier: the giant crabs or this giant octopus…
When I thought about it later, the octopus’ basin was quite small for his size. I just hope he had a bigger basin behind it for the night or something…
After walking for a while we encountered one of my favourite parts of the whole aquarium: the giant wall basin.

In front of the wall basin, there were multiple benches that got higher,
so everyone was able to see the basin well.
We just sat down when a woman in a diving suit jumped into the water and started to feed the fish and rays! I never knew rays could be so cute! They just kept on 'kissing' her with their little mouths so she would give them more food.

The rays were so sweet to her!
After watching for a while, we went to stand in line to look at the jellyfish in and behind a tunnel. After that, we just kept on walking and saw many sea animals, including two giant moonfish (who looked a bit creepy to me), tiny squids, weird sea/land animals and Finding Nemo’s Marlin and Dory. There was just so much to see! Eventually, we arrived in the souvenir shop. I swear, in Tokyo they have the talent to make cute merchandise for everything. Even the creepy moonfish!

Kiss the girl!
We looked through the windows and noticed there was something going on outside, so we quickly left the shop.
We found ourselves on a big square with some kind of big glass ring above, in which two seals were swimming (well, I think they were seals). You could see them so well and they were really sweet!

The seals returned to their own basin later in the afternoon, I believe.
Next to the ring, there were some big, round white blocks with coloured lights in it that sprayed water in an irregular pattern that you could catch. All the children, and me, were playing there!

I really had a ridiculous amount of fun with this!
We were getting pretty tired and decided to eat at least something. We bought a coke for my dad and ice cream for me (after some trouble with ordering. I didn’t know they were saying the ice cream taste was vanilla. XD). The ice cream tasted more like milk by the way, really nice! We walked past the penguins, some land animals and a pelican and decided to leave eventually, after taking some more pictures with a wall that poured water.

My dad looks a bit worried, but he looked like that on more pictures like these.
He was focusing on getting the picture right. XD
We really had to leave: we were so tired! In case you had forgotten: I was carrying a large, very heavy bag with me and not only that, but I was also wearing wooden sandals. My feet were killing me! I hadn’t expected to stay in Ikebukuro this long, so I didn’t really care for good shoes!
We left Sunshine City again and went to Closet Child one more time, to take some pictures of it in the dark, after which we returned to Shinjuku.
We were really hungry, so we decided to go to MyLord and eat something at the café I really wanted to go to: Café Est! Est! The fake food (especially the ice cream) looked so great in the shop window! We chose to order their ‘Popular No. 1’, which was a big plate with rice-filled egg, a cup with something cheesy and delicious, meat, salad, fried shrimp (I believe) and smiles.

I apologize for the blurry picture. I believe the plates were 15 inches long!
The food was delicious and while we ate, we could watch some baseball on one of the screens. Then, we finally returned to the hotel, Skyped with my mom and went to bed. It had been a tiring, but fantastic day!