Knitting in Tokyo
We are here!! My sister and I arrived Saturday afternoon (about 3 in the morning East Coast time). Tokyo is amazing. Where to begin.
First, the city is amazing. It is so clean, and people are so nice. We are quite lucky since our brother Bo both speaks and reads Japanese. This could be a bit overwhelming without a tour guide.
Sunday we went to Shibuya with Bo and Masae (his wife). This is a shopping district a bit north of where they live. It is right next to the Harajuku area…we saw several of the kids all dressed up. This has actually been one fo our first observations. People are much nicer dressed than most folks in the US. Much more fashoin concious. At teh same time that seem much more accepting of people doing their own thing. A lot of the women use umbrellas to protect from the sun.
Then there are the department stores. They make Saks feel like the local K-Mart. Clean. And they sell everything. Each has one floor that is dedicated to food. Sort of like a food court, but much higher quality. Fresh fruit and meat. French pastries. I need to get a photo before we come back, it is incredible.
We went to one yesterday called Printemps. (Go ahead and look, I’ll wait. I know the Japanese is hard to read, just click) At least 7 floors of goods. Mostly woemen’s clothes and house hold items. Sally got some snappy shoes, and I bought some gifts for work folks.
The interesting thing is that even in the department stores they have a lot of areas that sell crafting type items. This is the button section in Printemps, in case you want to embellish what you buy. They had different areas that sold lace trim and other things like that.
Then there is Hand Messe. Forget going to the Pyramids at Giza, this is makes the trip of a lifetime. It has 24 levels. Each specializes in one type of this. Like handcrafts, or stationary, or lumber, or Halloween costumes. 24 FLOORS. It bills itself as the “Vreative life store”. That is is. It even has an area that sells labratory equipment.
I bought enough Noro Kureon to make a sweater. and some time clover needles.
More tomorrow on the temples we saw yesterday.
August 15th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Have fun on your trip! It looks like you’re off to a good start!
August 15th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Hey I linked over to your blog because I came across your pony tail hat and I want to make it for my girl but I’m unsure about the whole hole issue. I have done some basic kids hats, but lean more to the dolls and toys in knitting. Anyway, browsing your blog I see you are going to VCU. I went there as an undergrad, oh, a million years ago. Really only a little over ten, but it seems forever ago. The school has grown exponentially since I was there. Currently, my hub and kids and I live just south of Richmond in Chesterfield county. Don’t move to Chesterfield, nothing much happens south of the James river. Every weekend finds us driving through the tolls to find something interesting to do in town. Anyway, drop a line if you want to. I didn’t really get where you were from (just in Japan currently!) so if you will be new to the area- welcome!
Karen
November 14th, 2007 at 2:01 am
[…] work. As a math nerd I lovegraph paper. Always have. This was one of the best things about Japan. Graph paper in every […]
November 30th, 2007 at 8:28 am
[…] I thought this would be a fun way to keep track of knitting stores. I even included Toku-Hands that we visited last summer in Tokyo. […]