Today we went to the Gotemba Premium Outlet, which is a village full of outlets of those branded stuff like Gucci, Bally, Hermes etc. Those are something like factory outlets (except that they are shops not factories) where the prices are cheaper, but of course I don't think they sell those new or current season items, but rather something like last seasons? Meaning that today is gonna be a shopping trip for my Mum & elder bro while the rest of us tagged along...
We had to take a 2 hour bus ride to the village as it was on the outskirts of the city..luckily the bus had a toilet in it. The bus dropped us off just outside the village and we had to take a shuttle bus in. while waiting for the shuttle bus, we noticed Mount Fuji in the distance and took some shots of it.
Oops, cloud in the way..
aha, that's better =)
Inside the village itself, we saw Mt. Fuji again and I took even more shots haha. These were better cos there were less things obstructing it... and there were less clouds at that time too.
As the sky got darker, the decoration lights on the trees were switched on...
This is Ferris wheel somewhere on a hill just behind the village. Took this when we were about to leave so it was quite dark.This is the first thing you'll see on the bus trip here. When you see that, you know you'll be arriving at the village soon...
21/12/08-22/12 -------------- Our flight for Tokyo was at 11.45pm on the night of 21/12/08. We were gonna sit the A380 for the first time, and the plane would be leaving from T3, which means we get to see the inside of T3 for the first time too. Therefore we planned to leave early to look around. Thus at around 7 plus pm, we were doing some final checks around the house, making sure all the electrical plugs (except the fridge of course) were switched off and any places were rainwater might collect were covered etc. I was busy reminding everyone to bring their important stuff like keys, money, passport when my elder brother suddenly came in and said he flagged a taxi already. So my mum, elder bro and I left for the airport first with most of the smaller luggage, leaving the big and heavy ones for my younger bro and father.
When we arrived at the airport, we had to wait a long time for my father and younger bro to arrive, probably they were unable to get a taxi, so my elder bro got impatient and went to check-in his own stuff first. After almost 30 mins, the other taxi finally arrived and the rest of us proceeded to check in as well. Usually only my father goes to the check-in counter and we just hang around somewhere near so that they can see our faces when checking the passport. So during this time, my mum was busy trying to stuff a coat into a coat bag, and that's when I remembered something very important-I forgot to bring my winter coat! This is the first time ever that I actually forgot something, not to mention something as important as that. Luckily we reached the airport super early, so there was time to take a cab back to grab my coat. I was so busy helping other people remember things that I forgot my own things....I guess I would have remembered it as I was going through a list of important things in my head, but my elder bro was so kan chiong, go and flag a cab before we were even properly ready so we had no choice but to leave quickly...Lucky I also stay quite close to the airport. Can you imagine if I stayed at say, Woodlands? Liddat sure no time to go back and take de...
After we boarded the flight, I looked through the Kris World guide and saw that there was Wall-E, which I wanted to watch for some time le, so I was quite glad. And I also watched something else which I can't remember haha. But there wasn't much time cos the flight is only 6 hours and each movie is about 2 hours+. When we first boarded, the stewardess asked me if I wanted supper or breakfast, but i ate before going on board so i said breakfast. But just before breakfast was served (which was 2 hours before the flight landed but I forgot the time), I decided to sleep awhile, so when they came to me I rejected the food...
When we arrived (already 22/12), we took a long bus ride to Tokyo Station (a train station) and then took a taxi to the hotel. Since this isn't the first time we've been here, we could recognise the area around there. Surprisingly, even though the hotel was quite near to the station, the taxi drivers always get lost -_-". The taxi driver this time didn't understand English at all so it was abit hard to tell him he's going the wrong way. We even gave him a map in Japanese, hoping he could read it, but apparently he can't read maps well. Actually, he stopped at an intersection for awhile, and if he had turned right, the hotel was like just a few meters away. We tried to tell him that but he couldn't be bothered to listen to us, I think he didn't trust us. Anyway, so he went straight and turned a whole big round before coming back to the same place, and this time he turned right at the intersection and we finally got to the hotel.
It was about 11 plus am when we arrived at the hotel, but we could only check into the rooms at 3pm. so we walked around the area, and got some food. My feet were killing me cos me and my mum were in heels and walking for 2 hours+ in heels in a cold place is no joke. we returned to the hotel after that and waited in the lobby cos our feet couldn't take it and we were quite tired cos didn't really sleep on the plane...
when we could finally check in, all of us quickly went to rest and unpack stuff from the luggage. After dinner I slept super early, like around 8pm? cos I was dozing off already...
23/12 ----- Today we went to Shinjuku, a popular shopping district. There, my elder brother brought us into a part of Takashimaya where there was this shop called "Tokyu hands". The store had 7 storeys of craft supplies, magic tricks, household items, pet supplies etc.,something like Daiso, except that it wasn't a $2 store. Since my brother has been here before, he went by himself to Ginza to shop for his own stuff...
We were at Tokyu Hands for the whole day cos there were so many interesting stuff to see! And I bought quite a number or strawberry milk scented bar soaps, cos i'm kinda into bar soaps now but it's very hard to find nice ones in Singapore...
Oh and my younger bro and I were laughing over a Tickle me Elmo for quite some time lol. I first saw this elmo on 100% Entertainment, where xiao zhu and xiao gui were tickling the elmo and it was laughing insanely. After that they left the elmo alone and went on to host the show, but it suddenly stood up on its on and they got a shock! Lol, it's not available in Singapore yet i think, couldn't find it. Here's a youtube video of it:
Hahahahahahaha! again again! ahahahah you did it again! lol i especially like the part where elmo wiggled on the ground and said some nonsense which I can't make out. =p.
I also managed to find very nice Hello Kitty organisers that cost like only 1/3 the price which I bought from Kinokuniya last year. I bought 2 cos I couldn't make up my mind which one was cuter haha. I'm currently only using one, but the other one can be used next year simply by changing the day headings at the top of the calender cos I realised that for every year, the date just shifts one day behind. Like if jan 1 was wednesday this year, it'll be thursday next year. Of course I suppose this doesn't apply for leap years..anyway, this organiser is just a calender infront and the back are blank pages so it's easy to modify it.
Haha took me super long to post about 2 days only...the rest are gonna be mostly pictures so i'll post in a seperate post.
I wanted to write about my trip to Tokyo ever since I came back but I wanted to upload some pictures as well so I was waiting for my father to dig out the camera for me (I gave him to keep it before coming back). So..he just gave it to me a few days ago and my school term just started so I don't really have time to blog about it now, will probably do so during the weekend.
But..i'm not quite sure how much I can remember haha, got quite a poor memory. I actually planned to "blog" in Tokyo on my DS, using a program called "TxtWriter" which allows you to type stuff and save it as a text file so that you can transfer to computer. But, things didn't turn out as planned cos for some reason the save function wasn't working properly, causing me to painstakingly type letter by letter a super long paragraph on my first day there, only to have the whole file erased when I tried to save. And I didn't bring any writing materials so I couldn't document it on paper too...
Oh and I think I took some videos in Disneyland too, not very good quality but nice enough.
