October 20th
October 20th, 2006 at 2:58pm
| Today was our first full day in Tokyo so we decided to do a few things we missed out on last time. We started out at the furthest point which was Asakusa here we took a look around the Asahi beer head quarters next to the station. The building is shaped to look like a beer with froth on top. there is also a big gold water droplet statue that the locals call the golden turd. it was a bit too early for their bars so we continued down the road to the Sensoji temple. The temple was huge and was making a killing with people buying incense and trinkets to burn at the shrines. It was meant to be a 400 year old temple but you could tell it must have been rebuilt after the war or something because it used bessa bricks and aluminium. We did a lap around the local streets such including the kitchenware street kappabashi dori on the way back to the station. The kitchen street was huge it would have gone for over a km and every shop sold kitchen stuff, plates, cuttlery, kitchen furniture and even plastic food, this must be the place the Iorn Chefs shop for their kitchen stadium. We would have liked a plate of plastic food for the coffee table back home but it was far too expensive, you could pay hundreds of dollars for a real good one. |
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| Next stop was Akihabara, this is well known as electronics town as 90% of the shops in this town are computer or electronics shops. a new shop here that was not open last time we were here is yodabashi camera, this is meant to be the largest electronics store in the world, it’s 8 floors high and I think we believe them. By the end of the 4th floor your brain hurt with all the computers, cameras, and plasmas. Lunch was up the top of this store at the fast food chain Pepper Lunch this is another vending machine restaurant they bring a sizzling plate of raw strips of meat to you with rice and you cook it up yourself, it was rather tasty.
We did a lap of the Akihabra area, there are basically 3 things sold there, new electronic equipment, second hand electronic equipment and magna cartoons in both comic and dvd form, and there.s the odd magna theme restaurant, where these girls dress up in silly french maid costumes and fluffy boots and are made up like the cartoon characters- they are pretty funny but the teenage guys just love it,, maybe a little too much. It seems magna is to Japanese computer nerds what dungeons and dragons, lord of the ring and little army battles are to Australian computer nerds…scary stuff! |
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| After Akihabara we stopped off at Ginza, Ginza is the area were we stayed last time we were here so we knew it pretty well. Under the rail bridge there is a collection of tiny restaurants and bars. We visited one we have been to before it is smaller than Gary’s laundry but still managed to contain a kitchen bar 2 staff and 5 customers (although we did spill out on to the street a bit) here we had a few beers and a stick of yakitori chicken skewers each. We avoided the other things on the menu like back parts and uterus (raw) and the old favourite gizzard. We were going to go the meat balls one but thought better against it. We had a look at the Nissan Gallery which had a couple of nice new vehicles on display followed by a couple of nice cold beers at a little bar upstairs around the corner. The place would have only been able to hold 10 people max. |
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| Next was Roppongi the night club and red light district it’s a bit seedy here and all the black Americans (or want to be Emericans) who work for strips clubs were annoying us trying to get us to visit their clubs, mostly girly clubs. Shortly after get out of the station we saw a guy come off his motor scooter in the middle of an intersection, he didn’t look very happy and was having a lie down in the middle of the road when we last saw him. Some bars along here are rip offs so we decided to move on closer to home and went to Shinjiku. Shinjiki is Tokyo’s skyscraper district, it was feature a lot in films like lost in translation and fast and the furious. There are a few bars and stuff here too we had a bit of a look around before heading back to Shibya. The station at 12pm would have had 30-40,000 people heading in all directions.
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