Shopping in Akihabara
I'm still struggling to find some middle ground with time. Regardless of how exhausted we were, our first night consisted of waking up every few hours and being incapable of comprehending that no, it's 11pm, not am. Nope, still night time. Your phone is not lying to you, newbie. In the end we were wide awake by 5am and ready to go.
As nerds it was only right that we spend our first day in the motherland. Our hotel in Asakusabashi happens to be a 15-minute walk, or one station over. A happy accident. We're cheap, and still figuring out mass transit, so walking it was. Truthfully that's what we do on most trips: pick a direction and just start walking. This time we found ourselves walking right into morning rush hour and, by minute 5, steadily pouring rain. First day in Tokyo and we're already sticking out like a sore thumb with our measly hoods in a sea of umbrellas. Keeping up those expectations. 10 minutes of sympathetic looks later, we detoured into a 7 Eleven and bought two umbrellas. Progress.
I promised Hamu we would hunt for camera gear and Gundam model kits, so our first stop was the monolithic Yodobashi Akiba, 9 stories of electronics, cameras, toys, and whatever else you could ever need. No joke, the 9th floor is a golf school. After nearly three hours of putting Target to shame, we headed up to the 8th floor and discovered where I want to be buried: a big, beautiful, sprawling food court unlike anything we have back home. I'm waxing poetic, but the all-tonkatsu-all-the-time restaurant we ended up at warmed my sardonic little soul.
Full and dry, we moved on to the other pillars of Akihabara: anime and video games. A visit to the Animate store, pawing through figures and manga we can't quite read, ogling the Final Fantasy cafes, spending way too much money on games at Taito Station, we lived the dream. The nerdy, nerdy dream. I'm an adult, I try to convince myself as I sink another ¥300 into a gachapon machine dedicated to Pokemon in tiny tea cups. I need to rejoin the real world eventually.
It's true, I was an adult. An exhausted adult who needs proper sleep to function. I would love to say that this day ended with neon lights and questionable discoveries or, you know, dinner, but it didn't. With empty promises to return after a rest, we dragged our defeated bodies back to our hotel and fell asleep at a meager 5:30. Not our finest moment, but pick your battles.
- Usagi
