MarioCart and Harajuku

My sister Talitha came all the way to Japan to visit us!  It was great!  We need more visitors.  Who wants to come?  

One day we went up to Tokyo without the kids.

Our first stop was MarioCart.  I was so excited for this!  I spent hours playing MarioCart as a kid...and as an adult.  I'm not a big gammer at all but I do enjoy MarioCart and all the Mario games really.  So the idea of dressing up as the characters and racing around the streets of Tokyo sounded amazing.  It totally lived up to the hype.

For my real life MarioCart experience I choose bowser.  I used to always pick him for mariocart, so it was perfect.  The kids knew we were going to do this and they kept talking beforehand about who should be Princess Peach.  In the end neither of us were, the costume really wasn't as good.

I would recommend this to anyone visiting Japan!

Next stop was Takeshite street in Harajuku and the area close by.  This street is so fun and crowded.

While walking around I saw this candy stop and decided to check it out.  I've seen it before but thought the kids would be too crazy so we never went in.  There are stairs leading down so I assumed that the store was at the end of the stairs like many other stores I've been to in the area.  Nope, I was wrong.  The store was only what was displayed on the walls along the short curved flight of stairs.  At the end of about 7 steps there was one employee standing handing out samples.  No place to even stand at the end of the staircase.  The store was the small staircase and that was it.  It was bizarre and not what I was expecting.

We headed to Domonique Ansel Bakery.  I can't find a good picture but I got the cookie milk shot with my frozen s'more and cronut.  Everything they have is so pretty.

We found the Awesome Store while exploring.

We then stumbled upon a really long line and decided that we should wait in it and check out what the craze was about.

We ended up with cute ice cream animals.  Mine was a strawberry pig and Talitha got a Sakura flavored dog ice cream cone.

After shopping we walked around the Meiji Shrine. 

I knew that the cherry blossoms were nearby but we had a hard time finding them.  It was getting dark and I wanted to hurry and find them.  We asked for help and eventually realized we had to exit the shrine area and walk to the other part of the park to find the Sakura or cherry blossoms.

It was crowded and pretty.  It is a Japanese tradition to set up a tarp and eat/hang out/drink under the blossoms all day.

It was a busy day!