Woke up on day 4 a bit late. It was sunday and it is traditional to sleep late. I wanted to go to Kappayashi street in Asakusa because it was famous for their kitchenware. However, because it was sunday, most of the shops were closed. The only ones that were open was selling fake food. Now, don't let the idea that fake food is cheap. A piece of fake sushi was upwards of 2000 yen. A bowl of fake noodles was 5000 yen. It think these were professional quality ones designed for restaurants though. There was also high performance cookware, but I didn't want to carry heavy iron stuff back.
And after walking around there, at 11 o'clock, we finally arrived at every geek's dream: Akihabara. Akihabara Electric City. Actually, if you think about it, there really isn't anything really special. It is just a few blocks of endless shops of manga, anime, dvds, electronics, wiring, ... and the best arcades around.
We wandered around. We did see some cosplayers. I bought some artbooks that cost me a total of 10000 yen. If I lived in Japan, I might spend a lot of money on random stuff.The manga stores were awesome. Seven stories of manga and anime related goods. There was a place for costumes and squaresoft licensed accessories. After a while though, we did go through the major stores and decided to come back later. Everything was looking similar, which is never a good thing.
We went to MOS burger for lunch. It's their local version of Harvey's. A more upscale joint than the McDonald's. I love the fact that some of their burgers used rice patties instead of buns. It was smaller, but still filling because it was rice, not bread (since bread is mostly air).
We went to Shibuya afterwards. Took pictures of the famous Scramble Crossing. For anyone that's ever played "The World Ends with You" by Squaresoft, Shibuya is REALLY similar to the one in the game. However, there are shops everywhere. Mostly clothing. I wanted to do a pose in front of every area in Shibuya that was part of the game, but that took too much effort. So we wandered around and people watched.
Finally, as we decided to get a drink from a convenience store and find a place to sit, we find the only ghetto park in Japan. It was kind of grimey, lots of homeless people. There was a miniture soccer field for Futsal. Looked fun, but I didn't have the shoes and it looked more like a league.
We sat on a rock, and realized from the way we dressed, we kind of looked weird in the Japanese environment. Most Japanese people dressed in suits if you were salarimen, even if you weren't at work. On the other hand, people dressed really casually or trendily if they weren't wearing suits. We were dressed in sports jackets, but no
tie or shirt. At one point, I thought we looked like little disrespect punks of the Yakuza or something. People kept giving us weird looks too.We walked towards Harajuku while comtemplating this. While there, I found a jacket I liked, and I also bought some 'wishing dolls'. They were cute. There was also this guy that kept trying to take a picture of this crepe store. I took one because I thought the shop looked cute. He was trying for a photo of the waitress. He also had a lens on a DSLR that was 3/4 the length of my forearm. What a perv.
We took the train back to Shibuya for the night view of Scramble crossing. At night, it really looks like the Japanese version of Times Square. Or Times Square look like a less pedestrian friendly version of Scramble Crossing. Either way, lots of people.Next on our list was going to Shinigawa to go to a Lawson station to get Museum Ghibli tickets. We had to go to Shinigawa because we didn't know where else was one.
Museum Ghibli, being a small museum, is a museum for Studio Ghibli, a studio making the most famous Japanese Children's anime movies. Names like Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Totoro are all part of some Asian childhood. They're like Disney movies, with much less musicals and much more plot. Now because they're small, they have a reservation system so that they don't become overcrowded. The reservation system is based on a machine that sells tickets to many venues in Tokyo and is only available at Lawson's. Think of a ticketmaster outlet that's only available at Macs.
At the machine, we were stuck. This was because for some reason, we could not reserve a ticket for the next day. We later found out it was because it was a holiday. We checked the 10th and tried to reserve it but it asked for a name and phone number. While we don't have a number, we did have a name. Still didn't work. It accepted only katakana and hiragana and it wouldn't accept 'Paul' as a name. We tried to ask the clerk, but our Japanese wasn't good enough. The clerks looked at it and didn't understand us very well so we tried to tell them we can't enter our name. After a while, we heard the two clerks speaking in mandarin. We tried talking to them in Mandrin... success! They helped us by faking a number and name and we got our tickets. I am now thankful that I know Mandarin at this point. Mandarin being useful in Japan, who knew?
We went to eat dinner at this point. Couldn't really decide on a place and Paul didn't have an opinion. He went to all the restaurants in Shinagawa while he was there on business. Lucky guy. So we decided by price and went to a cheapish place that did traditional food. It was only around 700 yen or so. I had a charcoal grilled fish and a special autumn soup of oysters and tofu in a dashi broth. Paul had a pricier fish but roasted in the same way. We communicated by pointing at the menu.
It was funny, the waitress actually made another waitress curious enough to indescretly peek at the 'foreigners'. I still don't know why they kept whispering while looking at us. It was weird. The food was excellent though.
Then it was back to Ueno and walk around again. There was nothing but Pachinko parlors. So we went back and slept.
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