Tokyo Day 2 – The slow roll… a bit of Shinjuku, a bit of Akihabara
After taking about 12+ hours of sleep to recover, we woke up to begin our adventure.. one thing needs to be explained first. Since we will be spending our entire trip in and around Tokyo, I simply had a list of things to do.. nothing really super mapped out into an organized itinerary because honestly I was too stressed out prepping my carry on and check in bags/cramming Japanese phrases into my head/getting our portable wifi and flight details sorted/researching the area and culture that I gave up and decided we should just walk around and explore and have a loose list of things to see. –So leaving the hotel gave me a bit of anxiety since I just felt unprepared.
Tokyo’s alleyways have sweet cats sleeping and feel 100x safer than alleyways in Toronto. I just don’t do alleyways in Toronto actually. *shudder*
We made it out the door and decided to walk around Shinjuku where we’re staying and eat things that looked yummy, go into interesting stores, and explore interesting looking places. We realized quickly that while this is a good idea and we will continue to do this, we should prepare at least 2-3 things to see in an area beforehand if it turns out that we don’t find anything to do. The language barrier can be a bit intimidating, especially when it comes to figuring out which random buildings we should venture into. Let’s just say, it’s very hard to tell what’s PG here and what’s not because even the sketchy places have cute / colourful signage >.<
This was lunch! Well, the plastic version that I pointed to
After eating breakfast at a restaurant that specialized in Hawaiian dishes, we decided why not jump on the subway and go to the nerd-centric Akihabara that we’ve heard so much about? so we did that.
Now, the subway…I… don’t know what to say. By some miracle we ended up in Akihabara and got back to Shinjuku, but we’re not sure how. I still am not sure how to navigate between the two different companies of subway and which lines belong to which…… I’m sure we’ll figure it out soon. No amount of Googling helped us. We ended up just getting on a train we thought was correct and waiting for the voice announcement in the train to say the station we wanted to go to was next, then we’d get off and follow the english on the signs. Spoiler alert: there’s isn’t much English on the signs.
Walking through side streets in Akihabara. I’ll get better at photography soon I promise.
After an entire 6-7 hours in Akihabara, we realized…. Akihabara is a bit hardcore for us. Unless we’re doing Akiba wrong, it feels like it’s ONLY for those who are interested in Anime (which I was more educated in anime)/retro games (wish I had any clue)/figurines (meh)/manga/general Otaku-ness… all of which aren’t really our thing or we just don’t know enough about. If you are into any of the above though, AKIHABARA IS THE PLACE FOR YOU. You will find walls of the stuff. We WERE pleasantly surprised by the amount of Magic cards we found though. We got some pretty great deals on cards that would be much more expensive in Toronto and there was a reallyyy good amount of English cards! Anyway.. if we are wrong about Akiba, please let me know… we were hoping to find more contemporary stuff/Nintendo (Pokemon/Animal Crossing) merch, umm and anything else we could recognize.
GIANT UNIQLO. I’ll be back for you. Once I get over this jetlag.
In all, a pretty productive day but jetlag– which I had honestly never experienced before– hit me like a rock. We hit up Mister Donut, Muji, a conveyor belt sushi, McDonalds (yup, tastes the same as NA….), ate Japanese-Hawaiian food, bought a butt load of Magic cards, won some UFO machine prizes, gave vending machines a lot of our money, and got by with very little awkward social interaction. Woot. We learned a LOT about how to do this whole tourist in Tokyo thing today!!
Ok, Bedtime.
hellofujisan 