Today, we ventured to the Ippudo Ramen store, the direct competitor of the Ichiran Ramen we ate at last night (its a way bigger chain). The ramen was great, and actually spicy enough for me to enjoy it, which was a plus.

Then, we headed to the Shinjuku area, which is one of the most trafficked parts of the world. Shinjuku Station itself earned a Guinness World Record for the World’s Busiest Transport Hub in 2007, with an average of 3.64million people each day passing through (those numbers, based on our experience, have only continued to grow).

Honestly, Tokyo is slightly disappointing in terms of “things to do” (kind of like Hong Kong), so we tried to see what everyone was up to, and ended up looking through many different shopping plazas and arcades.

We did have some fun with one arcade, which had a photo booth that allows you to take photos of yourself and then applies the stereotypical manga-style features to you, and then allows you to add graphics to yourself. Overall, it was a pretty fun experience (and hilarious because Perry’s big eyes caught the program’s attention, so he got morphed into a hilarious looking female character in all the photos).

After that, we continued wandering, mostly just looking at the architecture and window-shopping.

One of the coolest things we accidentally wandered into was a luxury grocery store, which had kobe beef for sale- the marbling is amazing!

We also discovered that Pringles is a classy affair here in Japan, with many different interesting flavors like cracked pepper and some kind of chicken party.

We found it funny that Japan uses Hello Kitty road markers in construction (see below!). We wandered back through Roppongi on our way home, and are now preparing to head out for a great dinner at a Japanese tasting restaurant. Tomorrow we fly home!

UPDATE: For dinner, Perry and I ventured to one of the best restaurants in the Shibuya area, which was amazing. The locals and tourists were totally fun, and the waiter helped us to understand all of the pieces of our dishes. We had:

We had sardines; miso soup with fish/shellfish in it; fish carpaccio; a sashimi plate; a chicken salad; tuna in a short rib style; fried sardine; fried rice with seaweed and fish flakes; prawns in prawn sauce. It was amazing. Now, on to Toronto and then Boston!