Tokyo! (part 7)

Early on Friday morning we went to the outlet mall in Makuhari located in the Chiba prefecture for some bargain shopping XD Took a loooong train ride which took us past Tokyo Disneyland. Really brought back memories of my first ever trip to Japan.

The whole Makuhari station area was surrounded by huge suburban malls, including the outlet mall which housed brands like Nike, Aasics, Adidas, Columbia, several girlish clothing brands, and strangely, Triumph and Wacoal lingerie stores.

Bought a new pair of sneakers at the Nike store for only 2999yen!! That's only about 40SGD!

I grew tired of shopping so I took a long walk through the town park and surprise!



Unknowingly, I had walked all the way until I reached the beach! Great view of Tokyo Bay =)

After lunch I rushed back to Tokyo to meet depyon, a fellow Singaporean who had just started studying in Waseda University. He showed me around the Takadanobaba area before leading me to the SILS faculty of Waseda. Really diverse place! There were foreign students as well as Japanese who had studied overseas, and most of them could speak really good English! I was equally impressed by the modules they could take as part of the course - A wide range of languages, sports, music and even community service! Makes me wanna study at Waseda for a semester or 2 as an exchange programme XD

We met up with a few Singaporean Waseda students before heading off to Harajuku where we met another group from Todai.



Harajuku Station.

We walked up and down Takeshita dori as well as Omotesando Hills.



The entire Omotesando Hills shopping mall is built on a slope, which explains the unique sloping design of its floors!

Sadly I forgot to take any more photos as the company was simply too interesting XD Heard lots of stories and jokes about their experiences of living and studying in Japan, including dates, girls, drinking, keitais, weird characters and whatnot ^^. There was a mix of the newbies, the (relatively) old birds, the and the outsider - me. You might say I was slightly envious of them =) We had such a long chat even after a long and filling dinner of ramen that we went back to the Ma-cu-Do-nal-do at Harajuku for supper and more chatting. That was where I saw my first McPork (or Ma-cu-Po-ku). I can dare say McDonald's would close down if they ever introduced that here in Singapore.

Soon the curfew times for those staying in hostels beckoned and everyone took the train back, which was still packed like hell (it was already 11pm!).
The whole experience was kinda surreal - I never expected to speak Singlish so openly and with so many fellow Singaporeans my age in Japan, of all places! It was a refreshing way to relax and just talk loads of cock especially after a long and somewhat quiet tour.

I learnt a lot about university life in Japan that night! Not to mention the life of a Singaporean student in Japan... Will definitely consider going for an exchange program in Japan in the future!