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Saturday, May 27, 2006 - Ginza and Akihabara

Today was the first real crappy weather day. Sucks because we wanted to get pictures and stuff from Akihabara. I ended up going to Ginza by myself and met with cousin in Akihabara (I love that place) afterwards.

Get up and it’s this real light misty type rain. Had the usual oniguri breakfast and then we stayed in the room a little bit to watch tv. That stuff is so funny, cousin got some video of it, although said it didn’t come out too well. Afterwards we went and got lunch at a ramen place, but we didn’t get ramen. Instead I got this bowl of rice and tofu in some sort of spicy sauce. It was really good. First time I’ve had chunks of tofu before. Also was able to handle Tofu with chopsticks, which actually seems more difficult than rice. I’m pretty impressed with myself that I’ve gotten pretty decent with chopsticks after only a week. I could ask for a fork, but that takes the fun out of it :)

Afterwards my cousin wanted to get some stuff done at the hotel and take a break. I still wanted to go somewhere so I went to Ginza, which is a pretty big shopping district. Even more than Harajuku. I didn’t have much time so I just stopped at the sony showroom. That was a nice place. Unfortunately no PS3 and not even a PS2 for that matter. It was just audio/video/pictures stuff. I did get me one of the in-ear headphones there. Wasn’t really that much of a price break, but I wanted a pair of headphones that weren’t as sound isolating as my Koss ones so I can still hear some stuff around me. For not being too big of a sony fan (even before the whole root kit thing) they do make really good headphones. Afterwards I took some pictures of the main intersection in Ginza. Supposedly it’s one of the busiest intersections in the world. Obviously rain doesn’t make it as crowded. Was still pretty busy. The train station was amazing. You could pretty much get to any building you want within a couple blocks by walking through the station underground. I lost count as to how many exits there were. It was also kinda fun being out by myself and still talking to people a little bit. When I asked the salesmen I wanted the headphones I was trying to fumble with the words in japanese and then I just said “here” and pointed to it and said “want it” and he figured it out. Then said thank you afterwards and I just said arigato gozaimasu just out of habit and kinda confused him a bit.

Afterwards I headed to Akihabara to meet up with cousin. First I went and got this cool little 5 port network switch. It can be powered by the computer instead of having to plug it into a wall. Will be nice for travelling and I need one. Also got a new memory card reader. The old I was using was usb 1, which means it takes a really long time to copy the pictures over from the memory card and onto the computer. This new one is USB 2, which is a lot faster, and it’s a smaller size with the cable built into it. So it’s a perfect thing to use when traveling, which is the only time I need a reader. So the old one I may just be dumping in the trash to make room for all the other gadgetry stuff I buy.

After dinner–which was curry at another one of those ticket machine places–we headed back to the hotel. Need to get all our stuff packed up. Tomorro we’re going on the shinkasen and going to Kyoto. Not sure how fast the train we’re on is going to travel. Maybe it will say somewhere. Still supposed to be a cloudy day so probably won’t be able to see Mt Fuji from the train. I think our current plan is to get all our stuff packed up and the last day send all of the lighter stuff back via mail. If not I’ll have to get a duffel bag to put all my clothes in and can check in for the flight home and carry all the toys and stuff i bought on the plane. Although I may be dumping a lot of the boxes the stuff came in and that will save space. So next message should be from Kyoto.

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