We taught Nik this game last night. New we’re drinking and playing. I regret my drink choice. It was 104 yen, about a dollar, for 355 ml of 8% of something that tastes like horrible whiskey.

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We’ve walked a lot. So the opportunity to sit in the front of one of the newest trains in the city and watch the view scroll by (and rest our feet) couldn’t be passed up.

This post also brought to you by carrying my external battery. Technology that can’t power itself for a day of use is frustrating.

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You’re on the skytrain. It’s packed to the gills, like everyone is so squished together people are being held upright by the other people around them.

And no one, not a single person, is talking.

As Sean said “things allowed on the train: looking at your phone, reading your book. That’s it.” We were on the train while he said it.

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We had a light lunch at a chain ramen shop because it was close, then headed to our scheduled event for the night at the Robot Restaurant. We didn’t eat here, as we’d been advised that the food wasn’t great. The show, however, was pretty awesome.

To start, here’s a couple photos of the lounge where we sat before the show started. Yes, that is a lot mirrors and lights and the guitarist is wearing a sweet robot outfit.

The show itself was pretty good – hard to go wrong with giant robots (you’ll see) and dancers. They weren’t amazing dancers, but the theme is good and the people were all pretty, and yeah, just a lot of fun.

The lady at the top is an audience member who was randomly picked to stand atop this robot and partake in a giant against another robot. Also giant.

This evil robot guy got eaten by a shark.

That is a huge robot snake. It moved around the tiny little stage and almost knocked peoples heads and drinks off.

These guys outfits were pretty cool, flashing lights and some neat hiphoppy dance moves.

LASERS MAKE IT BETTER.

After the show we went to a bar alley and into a tiny little place called the Albatross bar. I had a Darjeeling Liquer with milk, it was delicious. 🙂

This is the alley with all the bars, just a ton of little bars that seat 5-10 people each.

After the bar we went for ramen, but everyone ran out of battery life and we couldn’t navigate in the dark, in a foreign language for a backwater ramen shop without Google Maps. Sean gave up, hailed a passing cab and we all took the cab back to Shimo-kitazawa. My first time in a car driving on the left was weird! I sat in the front of the cab and marvelling when he turned left, from the left lane into the left lane.

We found a ramen shop easily. There are so many restaurants in this city it’s unreal. You can literally eat at any point along any given walking path.

This place had a vending machine where you ordered your food, and you bring the ticket in to get it. I put in 1000 yen and ordered a 900 yen item. 3 lights were still lit on the machine, indicating the ones I could still pick with my remaining yen. One had a picture of some noodles or bean sprouts and screw that. The other two had only Japanese writing on them. I picked one, Nik said it was the right one (neither of us having any idea at all) and pressed it.

10 minutes later I had my delicious soup with an extra egg in it. We took a photo of that magical extra egg button so we’d know what it looked like in the future.

How about I title by date? Yeah, that sounds good. I’ve heard that I have a couple new readers for this trip, so hello and welcome!

Unfortunately, no photos of Nik for this post. Nik woke up super early around 5am and went by himself to a fish market that Sean and I had little interest in going to at that hour. Instead, we got up around 730 and got ready for a walk at 830. We walked for 4 hours by the time we were done and saw a fantastic mix of close neighbourhoods, parks, temples and commercial highrises.

Cherry blossoms are in season and my new lens did a good job! 🙂

A cool Shinto temple that houses the spirits of the Emperor Meiji and his wife.

The actual temple. I clensed myself before entering, but Sean declined.

We met up with Nik and started walking around Shinjuku Gyoen, which was also great.

The gyoen (garden) has a greenhouse, which was nice and warm. Particularly good since it was pretty cold out this day!

We did a ton more, but I’m going to leave this post here for now since it’s pretty big and we’ll get into the later afternoon and evening in a bit!

We woke up early after a semi crappy night of sleep and had a plan to go to Akihabara…eventually.

This is the selection of tea-based drinks in the grocery store. Jealous.

Nik and I both eating random skewers of meat from the grocery store.

This is a delicious little package of amazingness. It’s rice and seaweed and a little bit of something else like a pickled vegetable in the middle. But the secret is that the rice is better than the rice at half the sushi restaurants in Vancouver, and this here is bought in the grocery store and corner stores around the city. Doing it right.

We got out at Shibuya station to wander for a bit. It was super early and our choice for lunch hadn’t opened, and the place to exchange our train coupon for a train pass hadn’t opened so we walked around Shibuya for a few hours. A cool place – big streets with big stores, mixed with little streets and little stores just off the beaten path.

The famous Shibuya scramble crossing. Everyone walks every which way when it goes green for pedestrians.

As we walked back we saw a tower we wanted to go to the top of. A little bit of escalators and walking past hotel conceirges later and we were at this fine view. The city just keeps going in all directions.

The train stations are pretty neat, and there are lots of them.

This is the lineup for lunch. The sign says that the wait is a half hour from where Nik is standing, and it extends in both directions.

A little alley of ramen shops in the Tokyo station. (not the city Tokyo, but the station Tokyo. Think “New Westminster station”, even though Columbia is also in New West :)).

Lunch was delicious. It was a bowl of noodles and a bowl of a thicker broth. You picked up the noodles and dipped them in the broth and slurped them up, which is why the paper bibs were necessary. At the end, they take your bowl of broth and add fish stock to make it an actual soup, so you can finish it up. This was a great meal, and totally worth the ~45 minute wait for it. Sean went somewhere with no line for lunch, and ended up wandering the station looking at things while we ate. There is a ton of stuff in these stations, they are like malls (not even “mini malls”, just malls in their own regard)

We trained around the center loop for 20-30 minutes and got off in Akihibara, which is known to be a place for electronics. We went into a 5 storey arcade that had people playing arcade games with physical cards they put on a tray that the machine could read. They played the card, then tapped the screen to make choices with the card they’d played. A super cool mix of physical and virtual!

We went into Yodibashi, which is a HUGE retail department store. 7 storeys, each floor with as much space as a Toys R Us with electric stuff. We went to the camera section, because Sean was in the market for a new camera, Nik was thinking of buying a lens and so was I. I ended up getting a phenomenal deal on a Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 II. Afer
Not only was the listed price about $100 cheaper than an online retailer in Vancouver (which is cheaper than a local store 🙁 ), but they also take the tax off because I’m a foreigner so I save an additional 10% there (list price includes tax!) and then they take another 8% off if you pay by Visa. Ridiculous.

Then Sean took us to a maid cafe. It’s not a sex thing, it’s this nerd cultural thing. Look it up, I can’t explain it in writing. I wdasn’t allowed to take photos of the girls serving, but here’s some deserts from the restaurant. Everything is so cute!

We went back to the room and rested for a bit before heading out to a place to drink sake and eat skewers of meat.

And in bed around 11, I think.

I can’t keep track of days… this is the night we landed. Our airplane landed early by a half hour, and we got through the trains really quick (thanks to Nik’s incredible navigation – Sean and I let him lead :)) so we had lots of time to wander our neighbourhood that night.

It was a little foggy, but this place is great. We’re in an area that has tons of little restaurants and shops, lots of people walking the streets. We found out today that Tokyo in general has lots of streets that are really only for people to walk on, and this whole area is criss crossed with them. Tons of character, exactly what’d I’d want in a place to stay.

Nik is very interested in eating the best food he possibly can, he’s done a ton of research and…then we found the place closed. Some more internet on the side of the street later, and we have a new plan – okonomiyaki at this place. The people next to us were friendly enough, but mostly we kept to ourselves.

This meal was a terrific first meal! I’d never had it before, I knew a bit about it, and it was in this great little place.

It’s like noodles, and an egg pancake and meat (in my case shrimp, Nik had squid) and you add miso mayo and the tangy sauce and man was it awesome. The onions were the worst part of it, and I loved it all the same. 😛 (I hate onions…)

After we wandered a bit longer, and walked into an arcade. A bunch of youths (or “youts” as my grandpa used to say) playing rhythm games of all sorts – drum games, button-pressing music games, dance games. We put some coins into this game that was really just a cleverly disguised punch force measuring device. I got the consistent highest, but Nik had the highest score on one.

Back at home, it was 11pm local time, probably 7am PST and I’d been up for a looooong time. I fell asleep immediately, but had a problem at 2am local, 10am PST when I woke up and swore that I was never going to be able to sleep again. Wide awake. Nothing to do but fake it ’til you make it, so I did my best and managed to sleep until 6am. At that point I got up to use the washroom and everyone else in the place expressed that they were also awake. 😛 We got an early start to our first full day in Japan!

I’ve been living on these all day. About a dollar 50, matcha green tea, from the ubiquitous vending machines around the city. The first one was hot, from a vending machine. The rest have been cold. It’s amazing.

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Happy to have been able to sleep until 6 am this morning! Had a brief moment at 2 am where I thought I’d never sleep again, but it worked out!

Thinking of gong on the train to Akhihabara today, a gaming and electronics center of the city.

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We started our trip at 1:30 pm, to catch a 4:20pm flight, which landed at 2:30 am (pst). A couple train rides and some walking later and we were at our place! Which does not have 3 beds…it has 1 bed and a couch and a mattress…

Went for a walk to get okinaminaki too tired to spell check) and now it’s 11 pm Japan time and I think I’ve been awake for 23 hours. Sleep…

SLEEP!!

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