Rainy day

Today was rainy, so we didn't do much. We attempted to visit the imperial palace gardens, but it seems they're closed Friday. Not a big deal, since it was raining pretty hard in the morning.

They have a whole bunch of moats around the palace, though the modern bridge system would make it totally raid-able.. though I guess warfare doesn't work like that anymore. The moats had swans.
Pretty swans. :-)

Then we wandered over to Ginza instead, to enjoy shopping in the rain (see last blog post for the stores' rain prevention measures). Within Ginza, we visited Gucci and some more interesting small shops.
You can't see it well in this picture, but there's a five-story Apple store in there. Admittedly not as pretty as Rodeo, but as Victoria Beckham says, lots of good shopping in here. [Jerry's editorial note: Nick got that last sentence all wrong. I did not say that Victoria Beckham said that there was a lot of good shopping in Ginza. What I did say was that Kylie Minogue commented on how Milan has lots of good shopping. There is a rather amusing clip of Victoria Beckham coming out of a Tokyo Starbucks being very amused by the automatic doors and analogizing them to the panels of a Bang and Olufson stereo system.]

This is the floor plan for a stationary store. Yes, they sell paper, writing implements, greeting cards, and, um, more paper.

This is the famous Kabuki theater near Ginza. What really struck me (that I failed to capture a photo of) is how this very traditional building is surrounded by totally modern businesses. A show was letting out as we walked by.


We also went into another toy store that was pretty cool, called Hakuhinkan Toy Park; a kid would have had a ball in there, though yet again not as cool as the FAO Schwarz that used to be in NYC. :-P

Oh, and we went into the Shiseido gallery. You see, it seems Shiseido is from Ginza, and beyond their flagship store ("The Ginza") and the other store that's across the street from the flagship one, there's also an "art gallery" which this time was focused on lipstick. Rouge, to be precise. They had some beautiful photography exhibited... of women putting on lipstick. Oh, and they had a bunch of lipsticks dating back to 1922. And advertising for the lipstick. To be honest, it was actually pretty interesting. Though I'll never again put my face into an interactive makeup computer thingie. It showed me how I'd look with rouge lipstick, and it was freaky.