Akihabara and The Tokyo Metro Rail

What a long day! We spent the whole day in the Akihabara district today, which is popular for being the cultural and commercial center for consumer technology, gaming, anime and overall "otaku" or loosely, geek culture. We got there a little early via the Tokyo Metro, which is amazing! It's clean, efficient and quiet in both operation and atmosphere. Not unlike the airport yesterday, the metro was amazingly quiet in spite of the number of people riding the trains and bustling through the stations. Also, apparently 90% of Japanese working men wear a power suit to work. Anyways, I digress- once we got a little help in finding the english translation on the metro card dispensing machines, it was pretty easy to navigate the trains to go where we needed to go. Rod is damn good at reading subway maps, so he took the lead and we made our way to Akihabara from the hotel in about 20 minutes or so, including one transfer.

Like I said before, we arrived early. We thought that the place would be busy and bustling when we got there a little after 8am local time. Nope- the streets were pretty dead and employees were just arriving and businesses barely began to open their doors. It was fine though, since it gave us some time to supplement our breakfast at the hotel with something a bit more... recognizable. We stopped at a little cafe in the giant UDX building for some coffee and egg-bread, I think- it was basically an egg over-hard on top of half a slice of buttered toast.

We had a couple main items on our agenda in Akihabara. First, we had to get connected with the city wifi, and in addition obtain a wimax or 4G personal hotspot so that we could stay connected during the rest of our trip. We had gotten some information at the airport yesterday about where we could get a hold of the city wifi password for tourists, so we started our search looking for these places. We barely had any luck finding someone who spoke English! So for all you guys who told us that finding English speakers would be easy- a pox upon you! It was actually rather hard. Luckily, one guy on the street noticed that we were a little lost, and offered assistance. He took us to a giant 7 floor electronics store, and informed us, in English, that we could get what we were looking for there. After thanking him and parting ways, we went into the store and after some mining, found a helpful, and fairly fluent english speaking store clerk who helped us get a Wimax personal hotspot at a relatively cheap price for two weeks. We tested the device and it works like a dream!

Now that we were connected, we had to tackle the next thing- shopping. That would be a whole day process and, well to skip to the end, we turned up empty-handed. We literally searched high and low for an Inuyasha hooded sweater for Rod's little sister, but everywhere we went, it was either sold out or not available. In the process though, I was able to find a giant arcade in a building with the Sega logo on the side, and put in a couple rounds of Super Street Fighter 4, I played a couple rounds against the CPU and a couple rounds against live opponents. I lost versus the human opponents, but that's okay, that was the plan anyways. We're going to go back again at some point during this trip and I plan on redeeming myself, now that I know how the system here works.

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The whole day was pretty incredible. We saw a lot of what we expected to see. We saw the famous Gundam Cafe, the Maidreamin' Cafe maids on the street handing out flyers, the many, many stores selling toys, figures, comics, collectibles, video games, card games... it really was geek heaven, especially if you're there to buy as much crap as possible. We spotted a couple places where we could pick up some souvenirs, but after all the walking and broken communication with the locals, we were pretty drained. We headed to the train station, picked up some snacks, and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we're staying closer to home and checking out the Imperial Palace Gardens and visiting a couple of nearby shrines. Thanks, and check back soon for more updates to this post and later posts!