AKIBAHARA

Today we went to Akihabara.  I know I spelled it wrong in the title.  Wesley gets it.

Anyway, Akihabara is nerd town.  There is an entire district of Tokyo for that.  It's a wonderful and magical place where the anime goods stretch for many blocks and no one believes in elevators.  Well, that's not entirely true.  Most of the anime stores go straight up about six floors or so, with each floor specializing in something different.  The stores are so cramped that the elevators are hard to get hold of, so we did a lot of walking up stairs.
First of all, though, we went to see Yui-sama's voice acting agency's building.  Guess what!  It was also an apartment building, and for that reason we couldn't go in.  You would think that we got the wrong building because it was apartments, but in Japan that doesn't mean you can't have an office on one floor.  In lieu of anything exciting, I just took a picture of the "no entry" sign.



And then the building's nameplate, just to prove I was there.

In the distance in the picture below, you can see Tokyo Skytree.  It's a giant tower you can go inside, like Tokyo Tower or the Eiffel Tower, but bigger.  It also opened just this past week, and so it is all over the news.  When no one's getting murdered or kidnapped in a country with no twenty-four-hour news channels, these are the kinds of things they report on.  Also funny cats.

This is a multi-story arcade run by Sega.  One thing you must know about Japanese arcades is that they all smell like smoke.  The other thing to know is that if you had an infinite supply of change and an immunity to lung cancer, you would never have a reason to leave one.



I finally played Tekken Tag Tournament 2.  I did very, very well for having never played Tekken with a stick before (usually I do fighting games with a PS2/PS3 controller), being super rusty at playing as Lili, and having not played as True Ogre since I was probably twelve years old.  I got all the way to the last boss (Unknown) with very little difficulty, and then she showed why she's a Tekken boss character by doing some obnoxiously damaging attacks that I'd never seen before.  ALSO I GOT TO HEAR LILI SPEAK FRENCH, which they made her do in this game since that's how it should've been all along (she is from Monaco).

Dinner was small, but so full of novelty that I was very satisfied.  We ate at the Gundam Cafe near the station, which is just a theme cafe based on a popular and long-running anime franchise wherein war is waged with giant robots (mobile suits), the strongest of which are usually called Gundams.  The only Gundam series I actually care that much about is G Gundam, the one most Gundam fans hate, but that's okay because I am all for theme restaurants.  I had the "Char's Zaku Rice" (Char is a character, a Zaku is a type of robot, and the dish was made to look like said robot's head, seen by clicking here) and the "Char's Zaku Smoothie" just because.  They weren't bad, but the smoothie was very, very orange-flavored and was probably the better of the two things.

Here are things I got.  The newspaper is a free paper about anime music, which covers a wide variety of genres but is often treated as its own thing.  That's Nana Mizuki on the front, and she's wonderful.  Moving on, in the middle you will see two metal dangly things I bought for my phone that are based on Fate/Zero.  On either side of those is a CD by 電気式華憐音楽集団, Yui-sama's other band.  You don't know how exciting it is to have these CDs.  In America, to get them I'd have to have a third party buy them, then ship them to me, because online stores that ship to America do not carry this band.  I've done that before, and it ended up costing me $80 for a $30 CD (but there was no other way).  So yeah, this is much better.