Japan 2010, Day 4

Monday, March 15, 2010

Today was a day I had Chris put into the schedule to let me freely shop in Akihabara. I first got some laundry out of the way in the morning since we’d be heading out the next day for our excursions into Nagano Prefecture, then I headed to Akiba.

Arriving at Akiba for the first time on the trip

I believe Arnond basically spend all day sleeping, and then did his own laundry later in the day. Chris went and explored Tokyo after doing his laundry as well. Anyways, in Akiba, I started off the day by going to Star Kebab for the first time. I had heard about it on the internet, so I figured I'd give it a try. It was, in fact, quite good, and it threw me off a bit for me to order from a guy who clearly looked European, yet spoke perfectly natural Japanese.

The Star Kebab stand I bought from

Then I went around and picked up a lot of things from the list of items I wanted, as well any good deals on things I wanted but neglected to list. This mainly consisted of video games, CDs, and some computer hardware. Also, it seemed like Touhou had in some sense taken over half of Akiba, as I was randomly finding that entire corners of stores were now dedicated to Touhou merchandise. I suppose it isn’t surprising as Touhou finally made it as its own Comic Market category, much like Gundam, etc. After a point, my bag of stuff got pretty heavy, so I decided to head back to the hotel to drop stuff off and do more shopping later. When I got back to the hotel, I decided to look up a movie to see later in the day, and though initially we were going to try for the Yu-gi-oh movie (It was in 3D!), it turned out we had missed all the showings, so we settled for the Nanoha movie. With the show time I found, there wasn’t going to be much time before the movie to do much else. Nevertheless, I left for Akiba again to meet up with Chris, who had finished his exploring for the day, and Arnond met up with us shortly after. We picked up food at McDonalds, where I tried the California Burger. It was ok. Based on the ingredients of the various US States themed burgers, I can only assume that bacon is apparently very American. We then went to Ikebukuro’s Cine Libre and watched the Nanoha movie.

Ikebukuro outside the station as we headed to the theater

As I expected, the movie effects were very flashy, and it more or less followed the first season plot. It actually provided a more sympathetic view of Precia, giving more of her back-story, and having her realize as she plummeted to her doom that she should have cared for Fate. We then went back to the hotel, and prepped for leaving to Suwa. I stayed up a bit later ripping some of the CDs I had bought, then went to sleep.