Melbourne - iphone

Because I was shooting a wedding, I made sure to leave my digital camera gear at home when I went out exploring (just for extra peace of mind) which meant lots of film photos (still to come!) and that my phone got a good work out. A fun thing I'll always remember about this trip was being in the plane, moments before take off, awaiting some pretty big news. The girl in front of me had her ear pressed against her phone listening to the announcement on her screen before the air hostess came upon the loud speaker to tell us that the marriage equality vote had passed in Australia - lots of cheering! In the vote, Melbourne had the highest support for marriage equality and thus on my walks I saw lots and lots of stickers and placards, banners and posters scattered in shop windows and on people yards - it was amazing! 

I also grew my rose obsession on this trip and nearly died seeing all the lovely front gardens, where it seemed, every third house grew roses *gasp*

Someone please sponsor me to do a 'roses of Melbourne' coffee book :p

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Japan Day Four (Harajuku Morning)

We woke up on Wednesday and headed to quite possibly my fav place in Tokyo, Harajuku.
Harajuku is home to sticker art, cool shops, a nice park and delicious crepes, now really, what more could you ask for?

Ben got devoured in the street art and after a few hours I got devoured by boredom, hey i'm a lover of the graff but even Ben was saying he was getting a bit over the stickerage by the end!

Despite my whingeness I have to say it was quite cool to track down the back alleyways, in the past I'd really only stuck to the high traffic areas

ben makes his mark on the tokyo scene

and I got quite excited to see space invader, has also made his mark, woot, I know at least one graff artist's name!

Panda paste up, the Japanese were a bit Panda crazy when we visited, I'll explain why, in a later post!

We looked at the shops

Woot, daiso, aka 100 yen store, aka the Aussie version of dollars and sense, but with much cooler stuff inside

I titled this one "hello kitty on drugs"

I also made sure to get a yummo crepe, ahh how I missed you're delicious crepe-ey goodness Japan!

And of course we had to do some more puricula

Since last being here in Japan, maybe 5-6 years ago, I did notice a few changes, one unfortunately being the purciula industry. The lead up to our trip I was giddly telling Ben how cheap and how diverse puricula was in Japan, none of this 6-8 bucks, for a photo business, we pay in Australia. Well I think one company now has the monopoly of puricula, in Japan as all the machines are fancy high tech, with super model lights and all the whizz bang fancy features.  One feature being the 'big eye' which you can see above, made me giggle but also made me long for the days of the cheapo low-tech puricula!

Anyway, enough puricula talk, after getting bored of looking at shops we decided to get our nature fix on so we walked across the bridge to yoyogi park and Meiji Shrine!

eek cute bus!!

and of course we had too! lol

Alright stay tuned for our park adventures...exciting stuff :P

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