Yesterday ended in a late night where I couldn’t start my usual blog writing time at 1am. It was our last full day in Tokyo and everyone decided to do their own thing which worked out great. Gretchen and Jack went to hang out with some friends they met on the plane ride to Tokyo, Alex and Stephanie went out in search for tea shops with hopes to participate in a tea ceremony, and Joanna and I went to buy glasses.
I learned recently that there’s basically a monopoly on the selling of glasses by one company Luxotica which owns these companies that you may recognize: Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, or Pearle Vision. This explains why a pair of glasses will tend to be really expensive in a retail store. There are other options like Warby Parker or Zeni Optical but the frames are still made for non Asian faces. What I mean is that I don’t have a very low bridge on my nose so the bottom part of the frame is resting on my cheeks.
I did some research and a lot of travel bloggers raved about Jins. We went to a number of their stores between Shibuya and Shinjuku. The procedure to check my prescription was free and it took less than 5 minutes. The computer basically figured it all out after the sales person asked a few questions. My frames were $67, if I had remembered to bring my passport, I would have gotten $8 off but with Joanna’s pairs of glasses I got 10% off. We decided to add the 25% yellow tint to reduce eye strain on electronics and it was an extra $35. Total with tax my new pair of glasses came out to be around $105. If I didn’t opt for the tinting, my glasses would have been ready in 30 minutes. It’s crazy how efficient and easy the entire process was.
It took Joanna MUCH longer to decide on her glasses so I decided to entertain myself in the shop.
Shinjuku seemed to be the higher end part of Tokyo. We passed by a pet shop that were selling dogs from $1,200 to $10,000. That’s AMERICAN DOLLARS. I’ll stay with my cheap $350 mutt Speedy from the humane society thank-you-very-much.
We ran into a store called Laduree, which I guess only has locations in Paris and Tokyo where they make macaroons and makeup. The macaroons and desserts were really nice looking.
After shopping we met up with Alex in Akihabara which is the gaming nerd district in tokyo and played some video games to eat up time until it got closer to midnight.
Alex decided to go back to the hostel, Joanna and I pushed onwards to Shibuya where they shut down all traffic in Shibuya crossing to do the count down. It was pretty much all foreigners but didn’t feel as claustrophobic as Times Square looks like on TV.
2 minutes after the countdown we pushed through the crowd to head to the subway, it was an easy ride back and we found the rest of the group with their own party at the hostel. One of the staff members cooked them soba noodles which is traditional for new years and a group of people who were leaving gave them a full bottle of sake.
Today was a really good day where we all got to do our own thing without pressure of making sure the entire group was happy with the activities. Some of us wanted to be out and about, others wanted to take it easy and we all got to take a break from each other :p
