Crisis, What Crisis?

A brief look at the news (BBC) would lead anyone to believe that Japan is financially crippled and everyone is living in poverty. Whilst this could well be the case in the future, right now there are no signs of this what so-ever and spending money seems to remain the number one favourite hobby for the Japanese. I have never seen people spend money like the Japanese. Everyone eats in restaurants all the time and thinks nothing of it. A trip to Tokyo Station and an effort to go to the Imperial Palace showed me this. The palace was closed and the Station- which is one of the few western old style buildings in Japan was under heavy restoration work. While Shinjuku station with over 200 exits and over 3.5 million passengers per day remains the world's busiest station, Tokyo is one of the world's biggest. We got lost. 3 times.

It was actually huge, especially as it includes about 3 underground shopping centres. I was looking for some souvenir items someone had told me about in the station, but I actually had no chance of finding them. Instead I found novelty KitKats:

They also had Wasabi flavour (Japanese Horseradish,) which actually tasted rather nice.

But I have never seen so many shops selling expensive things, not for foreign tourists but just for Japanese people who live here and enjoy spending money. These shops certainly give them the chance.

After that, we went to Shinjuku to have some noodles as we were starving. I actually prefer Soba (buckwheat) noodles to Udon (rice-noodles) as they taste more. However, we found a nice cheap udon restaurant selling freshly made udon. I decided to go for one where you get the noodles plain then dip them in the sauce at the side, then slurp (noisily of course.)
Then I went for some peace an quiet to a little shrine not far from where I live and ended up speaking to an old woman there who was very friendly and talked to me about Heathrow airport for a while as it is her only experience of the UK, but she was very impressed.
This water is from some really good rocks or something or nothing but I don't really know but it's meant to be really fresh and taste good so she told me to fill up a bottle in the little stream and make a cup of English tea with it. I think I might.