The rest of the week following the fireworks festival was fairly uneventful. Did some bill stuff, had some meetings at the BOE, and got internet setup in my apartment (which apparently required 2 maintenance workers, the IT guy from the BOE, a cherry picker, taking apart my AC and then putting the AC back together). Nope, not much going on at all.

Then came the weekend and my next trip to Tokyo! This time with Janet and Natalie. Day started out kind of crappy with me getting on the wrong train and making us late getting there. But after that embarrassment, it was all win! We started off in Akihabara, the electronics capital of Tokyo, where I picked up a rose colored DS, DS kanji dictionary, a new PS2 memory card, and an SD card for my camera all at the Yodobashi Camera. I also picked up my very first point card there, given how much I spent! Picked up my first Japanese manga while in Akihabara as well. Vol. 1 of the Ouran Host Club to help me with studying Japanese. Everyone seems to recommend reading manage to help study Japanese, so, now I have one!


Then, it was off to Asakusa to see the famous Sensoji Temple and walk down the Nakamise arcade. Nakamise is basically just a really long walkway of tourist and sembei shops. While there I picked up some grape ice cream, mochi, and also, a Tokyo spoon for my grandmother (can't believe I found one...yay!). She collects them and really wanted one. I looked for them everywhere and just randomly ran across the ONLY stall selling them.














At the temple, there is this fortune telling system. You basically pay 100 yen, shake this container of numbered sticks, pull out a stick, go to this wall of numbered boxes, open the box with the number that matches your stick, and.... voila!.....when you open the box, there's your fortune! Janet got a good fortune, I got a regular one, but Natalie got a bad fortune. When that happens, you have to tie the fortune to these pole things and they are supposed to blow away after time (taking the bad fortune away). We checked when leaving to see if it had blown away yet, but it was, sadly, still there.



There was also a samba festival happening at the temple, so there where all these crazily dressed people wandering around and doing performances. It was great!



After the temple, we went to Shinjuku for some dinner and then headed to Kabukicho, essentially Tokyo's red light district (scandalous, huh?). No, I didn't go to any of the bars, or ummmmm, other places there. Just went straight to the internet/manga cafe where we would be spending the night. What's a manga cafe and why were we staying there and not a hotel? Well, hotels are super expensive in Tokyo. The most affordable options available are capsule hotels (which usually don't allow women), love hotels (I think not), and hostels (didn't know where any were). Janet had previously spent the night at the cafe we went to, so we kept it safe and decided to stay there. The way it works is that you show up, buy a package for a certain number of hours and you get your own cube w/ internet, gaming systems, access to as much manga, anime, novels, movies, and magazines than you could ever watch. They also have free drink and soup vending machines and ice cream until 10pm. All for about 2500 yen (that's $25). You can't really beat that for shelter and entertainment purposes. Plus, the free onion soup and cold grape tea is great. I'm pretty sure that I got the equivalent of what I spent to stay there in free vending machine goodies. The only catch is that you can't make a reservation, and if they are full, then you're out of luck.



Anyway, the next morning we headed to Harajuku. I went here my last time in Tokyo, but apparently all the cosplayers and lolita dress up on Sundays, so we went to go check it out. Harajuku is also really well known for having great crepes (go figure) so we all grabbed one. The line to get one was huge and took a good 45min. to get through. Crepes were worth it though! We stopped at a few stores to browse and then went to the bridge where the people dressing up usually are, but no one was there. They were holding some type of traditional dancing competition, so we watched some of that and then headed home.



Up Next: A new type of festival

Labels: friends, Tokyo