Tokyo: Day 1
Before I begin. The pictures will be posted on the final day of this series.
We got to our hotel around 11PM on Friday night. I was so wound up in the various trains to get there, and our friends arriving that I forgot to look at the actual map from the station to the hotel. Thankfully I was able to call and ask for help. The man who owns the hotel rode his bicycle and found us and took us back.
Our friends, Courtney and Jason, had arrived in Japan on Wednesday so they had acclimated pretty well by Friday. Anyway, that night we just talked a little, had a beer or two and decided to meet at 10 or so the next morning.
Saturday we did a good number of things, and I am not sure if I’ll be able to remember them all chronologically. We went to Akihabara which I don’t want to explain, but it is the electronics capital of Japan and is pretty famous, even in America. They have stores that will sell only capacitors, or only vacuum tubes, or only blue LEDs. It is pretty neat, Jason was in heaven. While we were there we found a retro gaming store called “Super Potato.”
Super Potato was divided into 3 floors. The first floor was all NES, Sega, Gameboy, SNES, and that era of games. They had everything there. They had shopping carts full of original Chrono Trigger cartridges. I think that game is on Ebay for like $50-70. The Japanese cartridges were going for $5. The next floor was PS, Gamecube, N64 and such. The last floor was arcade machines.
In general this store was awesome. It had everything. Unfortunately it had everything Japanese which does no good to any of us. We could have bought the Japanese systems, but that is a little silly. The place was full of Uber nerds breathing heavily at their rare finds. I know they can’t read Japanese because they couldn’t speak it when they checked out. They just had to have it.
We also went to Yoyogi Park. This is a huge park in the middle of Tokyo that is famous for the weirdos. Unfortunately we saw no weirdos that day. Just throngs of people out enjoying the weather.
We also wanted to see robots, especially the Sony QRIO, but we didn’t know it was discontinued. Still, we went to Ginza and to the Sony building and checked it all out. Pretty neat. We were hungry and it was definitely dinner time. We wanted to get Yakitori, but it wasn’t easy for me to read all of the signs we passed for Yakitori, and we were in Ginza which is famous for being like the Japanese 5th Avenue.
We decided to hop a train to Shinjuku which is famous for being full of people, full of karaoke, full of seedy places, and full of cheap food. Sure enough the first place we see is a Yakitori place. Unfortunately they catered mostly to Foreigners, so the prices were doubled what they should have been and it didn’t taste quite right. I think the staff was actually Korean, but we ate our fill and headed back home.
November 30th, 2008 at 6:03 pm by rl
