Last night I was able to get my first full night of sleep in 4 days. I had to unfortunately skip a trip to a Karaoke bar with a group of new friends but I completely crashed at 9:30 after dinner. This morning we headed out early and started the day with some very nutritional convenience store breakfast. There are 7-11s, Lawsons, and Family Marts every few blocks and they have the most delicious sushi triangles. You may be used to greasy hot dogs rolling around at the nearest SuperAmerica but the food at these places is great.
Today I had a sushi triangle with pork and a mango and lychee juice box
Today’s agenda was to head to Akihabara, the Mecca for all things nerdy in the world. We spent about 3 hours and $20 playing the best video games. There were so many crazy percussion games that people were playing. I stood there watching them press buttons to beats and tunes and could barely follow how to do it. This game seemed quite popular, unfortunately I don’t remember what it was called.
I didn’t know that Valve made a Left4Dead arcade game that was in Japan, there was a bit of a learning curve at first since everything is in Japanese but it was pretty cool to play, the maps were the same and instead of moving with WASD, you use a Wii nunchuck-like controller in your left hand, and a mouse in the right.
My absolute favorite game that we played was this incredible Star Wars game where you sit inside a little sphere that has full surround sound and blows wind at you when you accelerate. It was incredibly immersive and was so fun but pretty expensive though, $2 per play.
Being Akihabara was absolutely overstimulating. There’s lights and sounds everywhere blasting in your face and just so many things to spend money and have fun with. We barely scratched the surface on what that part of Tokyo has to offer so we’ll have to make another trip out either with the remaining time we have this week or when we return to do our souvenir shopping.
I asked the front desk people at the hostel where we could go for a “sushi train” which is the conveyor belt sushi. We headed out of the craziness and to Ueno, wandered around aimlessly looking for a sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt. I realized that when I want to do something specific, I need to do the research ahead of time on my phone because my lack of Japanese doesn’t help when asking people for directions. After a while of walking around in 95f heat, we finally found a restaurant. This one had really tasty sushi for a cheap price, about $1.40 per plate of 2 pieces of nigiri.
By the time we were full, we polished off 23 plates for about $35 total. I’m absolutely loving Tokyo right now, I think it has definitely surpassed Seoul on my list of places to re-visit.
