City-Walker: Advanced level!

Righto then! I'm back, all. Mah b, it's been busy and I've been perpetually sleepy.

Anyway, straight to work! First order of business, we'll need to... TIME TRAVELLLLL.
Or just, y'kno, remember back to Sunday. However boring you want to be.

But yes, so Sunday was a day filled with exploration! And adventure! And discovery! And LOTS AND LOTS OF WALKING. One of the other student residents of DK House Warabi was kind enough to offer to show me around some places, so off we went! FROM 10AM TO 6PM. Outside of a lunch break where we sat down to eat, we were walking. Walking. The. Entire. Time.


Akihabara

This is a place practically *made* for geeks. For the most part, guy geeks. Or particularly, geeks for anime, manga, and Japanese video games featuring (disproportionately) voluptuous females. And/Or those who would enjoy seeing maids around every corner.

Taiko game! LOOK AT THOSE ADORABLE CHARACTERS


There are also TONS of arcades here. And not like the dinky ones in the U.S., not a whit like them. These are arcades that have games jammed side-by-side across an entire floor of a building. These are arcades where each game has its own stereo system to blast the music into your ears so loudly that you can't hear anything further than 3 feet away from you when you play. These are arcades where you can break the equivalent of $120 because people can and do spend that much, sometimes even in one sitting.

Maids! Everywhere!


I went into a bunch of buildings around here, several of which were chock-full of manga and anime merchandise. There was one building I went to which had an entire floor dedicated to each type of media, i.e., manga, anime, dating sims, games, CDs/DVDs, playing cards. There were others where you could find merchandise from older series or get cosplay costumes/materials. It's funny, I noted to my friend that in the U.S., you would have to buy a wig online (unless it's around Halloween) and then maybe dye or cut it to the right shape, but here, BAM! You walk into a building, go to the right floor, and 1/3 of the store is just rows upon rows of crazy different wigs for your cosplaying needs.

Inside of these buildings, there are often cafes too, presumably so that you can take a rest from shopping around so much. One of these cafes looked very nice and modern, classy and quiet. The inside had display shelves along the walls to showcase specialty anime merchandise or art. There were mostly couples or small groups of friends playing DS together inside the cafe. In another building though, there was a... different type of cafe. Can you guess what it was? It starts with "M" and rhymes with ummm... "laid". <_<. Thaaaaat's right! A maid cafe! Girls with high-pitched voices in frilly uniforms with a short skirt ready to serve you food! Expectedly, this cafe had pretty much male customers exclusively, and there was a line of guys waiting outside for their turn. I'd hate to be one of those guys waiting outside, I feel like it would be so embarrassing...

SPEAKING OF CAFES, guess where I went?!




Um, some kind of curry? With little, little, tiny pieces of meat.

...Undam Café? Curses, the "G" was cut off. >:/

WHY YES, THAT IS A GUNDAM CAFE. KA, be jealous :P. Haha, there were a few huge screens inside that showed various Gundam stuff, whether it was merch, clips from various shows, or just a silhouette of some of the characters. It was kinda cool and cute, everything inside was fashioned to be like "Gundam"-ified or something, including the decoration of the foods.

Ueno

After the assault of fake light on our eyes, the claustrophobia from tall buildings squeezed close to each other and towering over us, and the all kinds of electronics surrounding us, we decided to head towards Ueno Park in search of a big, open, green area. On the way there, we passed through an area that was like a mix between a pedestrian mall and an open air market. Foods and overpriced touristy souvenirs everywhere! How lucky, everything I ever wanted in life and from Japan! Haha, just kidding, I didn't buy any overpriced touristy souvenirs. I won't comment on the food part tho...

  



Eventually, we reach Ueno Park, and it's so... green! There are apparently hundreds of sakura trees there, and it's apparently very popular during the blossoming season. Do you know, I've seen plenty of cherry blossom trees, but I've never once seen one in blossom before? Not in real life at least. It's too bad too, from what the others said, I'd just missed the blossoming season by a month or two! Curses! Seeing a park full of blossoming sakura trees in Japan... that would be like a dream, haha.

But yea, Ueno Park is gorgeous! And it's also really big. And so greeeeeen! It's so interesting, just this expansive area hosting hundreds of trees and a large pond while simultaneously hiding several shrines in the middle of a city whose average building has at least 8 floors and is seemingly made out of glass. That was a long sentence with a lot of words. I apologize. Here are some pictures to make it up to you. (Hover the mouse over the picture to see words if you want to)



A picture of Japanese ladies taking pictures of a cat that could've been dead for all they knew.

After walking around the park, we decided to see if there was anywhere else we could go. With the power of SCIENCE and MAGIC (i.e., an iPad and one of those internet-giving boxes), we looked up the way to Asakusa, an apparently touristy area with a bunch of those traditional looking gates/shrines/temples/whatnot. It was only about a 20-30 minute walk, not bad at all! Also, pretty much not possible for the majority of places in the U.S., just sayin'.

Asakusa

Once we got here, you could tell right away that it was meant for tourists. This place was PACKED. And of course, everyone wanted to take pictures of THIS

Glorious, is it not?


Oh wait, sorry, that was just me. I meant, everyone was of course taking pictures of THIS



Why yes, everyone *was* trying to take a picture of me reaching to touch the bottom of a big lantern.

In the back there, you can see a little bit of this large temple that was closed. People were lined up in the front to go up the steps and make a prayer in front of the temple. Also, that shorter building that's between the jumbo lantern and the jumbo temple was one of those places where you can get a fortune thing. Being the tourist that I am, of course I want to do it!
 

And so I do do it. NO ONE CAN STOP ME FROM MY TOURISTING WAYS.

For those of you that don't know how it works, there's this metal capsule with a lot of sticks inside. Each stick has a number etched into it, and the capsule has a little hole on one end so that you can only shake out one stick at a time. You rattle the can for a bit while thinking of your "wish," and then you shake out a stick and look at its number. Find the corresponding number on the drawers that are all lined up around the little building and open it to take your fortune reading from there! (btw, there aren't like hundreds of numbers, it's just that there are several stations around each building). Well, so, I know you guys are real curious now to see what fortune I got. I know, I know, I was curious too. But you know what curiosity did to that cat? Well? DO YOU?!?!

Yup, that cat was skinned, skewered, and grilled like some delicious yakitori.

;_; And you wanna know the best part of it all? Just like in an anime/manga, right after I get this fortune, my friend decides to try it out too and, surpriiiiiise, gets BEST FORTUNE LUCK. I think it was even spelled correctly too, that's how much better it was. Meanwhile, I got the paper of doom that essentially says: "Your luck is so rotten, if there were 5,000,000 papers that all but one said 'Congratulations, you won a hundred million dollars! Enjoy the rest of your life, you wonderful person, you!', you would draw the one paper that said 'Congratulations! Here's a single wet wipe for you because you have been chosen to clean out the mens' restroom where someone had violent, projectile diarrhea all over the walls. Now, get to it, there are customers waiting."

But anyway, enough of bitterness and bad luck and poop-walls and curiously grilled cats. Back to a positive note, positive! Here are more pictures of some beautiful, beautiful food, I know that makes you feel better.



Takoyaki! Basically, fried octopus balls. Or rather, maybe I should say fried balls of batter with octopus inside? The other one sounds a bit... misleading.

 As we started leaving, I heard what sounded like a lady talking on loudspeaker and saw a crowd gathered near the sound. So we decide to pop over real quick to see what everything was all about and guess what we found! A monkey show! Trained monkeys! A gag-like comedy! Hahaha, it was so cute and funny too. They really made it seem like the monkeys had some attitude and could actually understand them lol. I took a video of the whole thing from when we saw, but so far it hasn't been loading on the internet very well (it's like 15 minutes long, haha...). In the meantime, though, feel free to look at this picture and pretend like you're watching an ultra cool, super funny live show starring dressed up monkeys that do tricks like jumping over hurdles, walking on stilts, jumping over hurdles while walking on stilts, and doing gag comedy among other things.


Look at the monkey in pink, so cute!!! I also really like that lady's pink shirt thing...