Akihabara - for real!

I went to Akihabara yesterday, but because I was so tired and the internet was being dodgy, I didn't post anything yesterday.

This time I made it, to the real electric town as they call it. It seriously was electric town. Kind of like a Singapore Sim Lim, but more, and not all in the same building. There's a sprawl of camera and laptop and video game stores everywhere, not to mention the 7 storey Club Sega, which, now that I'm learning Japanese, must be pronounced "sayguh". And half of you already knew that I bet. I spent about 30-45 minutes in there, just watching people play games. It was pretty cool. The entire first floor (each floor is not that big though) was filled with UFO catchers, those machines where you have claws to pick up stuff. There were probably about 30-40 of them crammed into the first floor, and tons of people were throwing money in, trying to pick up whatever. One of the photos is of a UFO catcher. Then I went up to the 2nd storey and there was a massive House of the Dead 4 display, with about 8-10 people watching this guy shoot some boss spider. All in all, very cool. BUT! The coolest game is this pseudo card game with a kind of grid and a monitor. The monitor unfolds all the action, but people play by placing and moving cards on the grid. The one I saw yesterday was like an old, medieval, Japanese type of war. The cards on the position of the grid determined where the armies moved on the monitor, I should take a photo the next time I see one. They have different variations though, I've seen one where instead of war, its baseball, and another one, fighting mechs and stuff. All very Japanese, all very cool. I then went to the 3rd storey, and it was all Tekken 5, Streetfighter (old school, and Alpha 1, 2, 3, Streetfighter 3, Arthur n Andrew, you would've loved it), Virtua Fighter 4, and a host of new tennis games on some awesome screens. The tennis games looked like they were in high-definition or something. The way the arcade's set up is that machines are back-to-back, and are always connected to each other, so you can play tennis against each other, fighting games against each other, soccer against each other, so even if you're on one side, you can see what the person on the other side is doing, even if no-one is challenging him. Cool. The 4th floor was all fighting mech games, which, if I could speak and read Japanese, it'd be the first game I'd try. There were like a set of 12 machines, 6 back-to-back, and a Red and Blue team. You've probably seen it in Australia, but it was awesome watching it. I like watching arcade games more than playing them, I'm not sure why. Maybe because I suck.

Ok, Club Sega story over. The rest of Akihabara is basically the same so there's not much to tell. Tons of shops selling roughly the same kinds of things, electronic paraphernalia, laptops, cameras, memory sticks, mice, etc. Though the first part I walked through were selling all little electronic parts, some of which I couldn't understand. There were a lot of those things you see on motherboards and stuff like that, little alleyways selling bunches of these things. I'm looking at buying a hard drive, but I'm not sure whether I should wait until I hit Singapore. Generally, Singapore and Hong Kong are the cheapest places for electronics, even though Japan might make tons of them. But I did find some 300GB hard drives selling for around $195 AUD, that's dividing yen by 80. I think that's pretty cheap.

I did stumble upon a few anime figurine stores, and I was a little surprised at the figurines they had. There was porn for everyone to see. Dotted around the stores were nude figurines, and these are not hidden away where children can't see them. They're well exposed, which could say a lot for Japanese culture. But nothing impressive. So far, its actually been a little bit hard to find anything anime in Japan for some reason. I'm probably just not looking in the right area, or maybe anime ISN'T that popular! Hahahaha, anyway I'm gonna take a look at the Ghibli Museum one of these days, the films are all ones you've heard of; Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, the list goes on. Miyazaki is said to be the anime guru because of these awesome feature length films.

Alright, you've heard enough of Akihabara, which is exactly how I felt yesterday. After having to squeeze through crowds in small pathways and what not, I decided to take a walk and see where it took me. I ended up some area I think was called Chiyoda. I had found a city map and decided to take a look at a park, so I walked a fair way away from Akihabara. I did end up getting some nice views. One is a shot of Awaji park, which I thought might actually look nice...then there was St. Nikorai's cathedral, a REALLY nice river...hehehe, and some other Japanese style buildings dotted around the suburbs. Oh, and the Japanese Football Museum, which is in such a secluded area that I would've never found it if I was looking for it. I think the team for the World Cup is called the Samurai Blues.

Too long a post I know, but I did have a long day walking around, enjoying the sights. Enjoy the photos!

Minatomirai: Yokohama's "Docklands"

Today I had work from 10-2. After all that, I came home and then went with Joash to Yokohama initially, then Minatomirai, which is two train stops away from Yokohama. We thought we'd look around Yokohama and this is where we kinda ran into the parade that was taking place. I took some photos but for the most part it was pretty boring. When we first saw all these people crowded at the edge of the street listening and watching someone sing on a float, we thought they might be famous. We asked one of the guards "Who is that?" (in fluent...english of course), and he replied "Ehh...normal person." That was quite a funny anticlimax. It turned out there were a lot of floats passing through for some parade, and no-one was famous, but a lot of people had stopped to watch the festivities so we got sucked in...hehehe.

Anyway, we walked around Yokohama for a little bit; I'm pretty familiar with the area around the station, so none of it was new. We did run into the street band playing some funky jazz so we stopped to listen for a while. Here is a link to a short video I took, nothing awesome to speak about but if we'd stayed we might have heard some good stuff.

We got bored at Yokohama in about 30 minutes, so we headed towards Minatomirai. The train line built to reach Minatomirai and Motomachi (Chinatown) is pretty new and so the area is very modern and very spacious; completely different to Tsunashima, Shibuya, Yokohama, and most of the cities we've visited so far. I really liked Minatomirai for this reason. They had large modern buildings, and we were headed for the Landmark Tower, which is in the Guiness World Book of Records for having the fastest passenger lift, able to reach a speed of 45km/h, made by Mitsubishi! That's a fun fact for you. As I was waiting in the line, it really reminded me of when I was in Shanghai with Arthur and Joel, waiting to go up that Jiang Yang Tower (or something like that). Anyway, the view was pretty cool. I wouldn't say spectacular, since it was mainly buildings, and it was also pretty busy...but the weather today was probably close to the best weather I've had since coming to Japan. I took about 20-30 pictures up in Landmark Tower because I didn't want to miss the opportunity, but I think I'll actually probably go up again at night-time to catch the night lights, but I will need a tripod to take some good photos.

Well, that's about it. Had a good day, but it was pretty busy because its the first public holiday in Golden Week. Tomorrow when I go out, it promises to be just as busy. Enjoy the photos! I know I haven't really taken that many.

Urgh.

Missing home. I got home from work at 5:00, slept from 7:00-9:30pm, so wide awake at the moment. Went for a walk at around 10:00, just walked around Tsunashima by the river. When I was out there by myself I just couldn't stop thinking about home, and why the heck am I here. There are times when I think of the job; its the same all the time, there's nothing different day in day out, so why don't I just go home? Things are more exciting back home, I can get on with life back home, I've got real friends and family there... Most of the time I don't allow myself to think of that because I'll just think of other stuff like learning Japanese or whatever but tonight gave me all the time to think. I miss church. Meaning the people.

Have a funny story to share though. My roomate Joash taught a Level 4 today. He asked him to name some famous people. The student's answer was: "Ichiro (baseball player), Nakata (soccer player), and Darth Vader. :)