Bunnies Kawaii!

First thing today we went to the Meiji shrine, located in a large park. On Sundays they often have weddings at the shrine, and we saw one. There was a guard there trying to keep tourists away from the center of the shrine so that people could go up and pray if they wanted to. When you pray at these big Shinto shrines you throw a coin into the box, clap, bow your head, and clap again. One coin was stuck at the top and didn't fall into the box, so we tried to hit it to knock it in but both missed.

From there we went to the nearby Yoyogi park. There was misty rain all day so we enjoyed our clear umbrellas. Often there are people there with dogs and costumes and costumed dogs, but they weren't out in the rain. We did see a dance class at the exit of Yoyogi park, under a bridge. I tried to learn some of their moves... Leia denies that I am an amazing dancer. One or two of the girls there was in a costume.

Rather than take another subway to Shibuya we walked through the "cat street", a pedestrian road where the young people shop without the absurd prices of Shibuya or Ginza. We peeked into a few shops, a nice-looking cafe with imported coffee, and a bar, but we didn't really find anything worth buying. Sadly, we also didn't see any of the Japanese youths in costumes or outrageous clothing.

We went to see the pedestrian scramble in Shibuya, which is a big crossing with many people going every which way when the lights turn green. We'd actually seen one like this in Osaka already, but this was much more crowded. We had fun running through it flailing our limbs. There are again many shops in a few blocks around there.

The highlight of our day was when we took the subway to yet another area of bars and shops to find the nicest-sounding bunny cafe in Tokyo, according to an overview of Tokyo animal cafes I found. The door was locked, so we had to knock to be let in. They have three zones that we saw, separated by barriers with little doors we could walk through but the bunnies were not supposed to. They had lullaby music playing and we felt like we should speak very softly the entire time we were there. They took our shoes, made us wash and disinfect our hands, and gave us aprons to guard against bunny excretions. The bunnies still managed to excrete on me but they were so cute and fluffy that I didn't mind. One of them, named Moo and colored like a cow, was very athletic and kept trying to climb up the sofa into the next enclosure. Many of the bunnies were lop-eared, and one was a much bigger breed than others, but they all seemed to be in good health and spirits and they got along well with each other. We got little cups of bunny treats to bribe them with and they climbed all over us. It was a little difficult to order the right kind of tea in this cafe since they didn't speak much English, but I found a Japanese menu and pointed out what we wanted. We had two cups of tea (paying extra for the second one) during an hour of cuddling with adorable soft bunnies, which Leia said passed very quickly. Upstairs from the bunny cafe, as far as we could tell, was a brothel.