It was a dark and stormy morning. As the sun struggled to peer through the clouds like a child trying to see through wrapping paper on Christmas morning, droplets fell from the sky and landed with a soft metallic clang against the railing. The kind of sound that could only be made when rain hits high-quality, thick aluminum.
In short: it was raining; it was humid; I wasn't looking forward to leaving the apartment. But Hector and I ventured out anyway. I won't bore you with the details of how we got to Akihabara, but you should just imagine that we got lost at least once for every place we visited. Every time I thought we figured out the system, we were thrown a curveball. Either by Google Maps for not giving us the correct platform, or human error in not being able to tell which way we were facing.
We arrived in Akihabara without any real direction or objective. I knew I wanted to go check out some Gachapon machines. Hector knew he wanted to go to a maid cafe. I knew I wanted to avoid going to a maid cafe at all costs. So it was good that we were all on the same page. Compared to the places we had visited up to that point, Akihabara was the busiest. Lots of hustle and bustle as people went about their electronic and anime shopping.
I used to have a thing for anime. Used to. I can see why people love it so much, but I lost interest. From time to time I will go through the anime category on Netflix or Hulu and read some descriptions, but I never really go past that point. I do like to watch Dragon Ball, though. So why were we there? I don't know. Mind your own business. We dropped into a small shop in the UDX building to check out some things. As you could imagine, I didn't recognize 95% of the things I saw. That became a recurring theme throughout the day.
We got a bit hungry at this point and rather than grab some fancy McDonald's, we went up to the third floor of the UDX building to a place called Okonomi Yukari. The restaurant specialized in okonomiyaki, which is kind of like a grilled egg pancake with fixins. I should be paid to write a dictionary.
The style of the restaurant was grill-it-yourself, but we were lucky enough to have our server take care of the cooking and flipping for us. Had I been given the opportunity to cook, you would probably have already heard on the news about a skyscraper in Tokyo burning down because a stupid American didn't flip his pancake at the right time. Hector's order was plain with some cheese. Adventurous, right? Mine, on the other hand, has shrimp, pork loin, octopus, and a few other things. Fat American and all.
The service was great. The price was good. The food was okay. Simple dimple. Personally, the texture was not to my liking. You could compare it to that of egg foo yung. The assortment of included meats made it difficult to eat with chopsticks as it was prone to falling apart. Perhaps "okay" is being too harsh. Good is accurate. It wasn't bland or forgettable.
From there, we dropped down to the ground floor and went back outside to cruise the streets. It didn't take long for me to spot some gachapon machines. If you don't know, they are almost identical to those little candy and trinket machines at grocery stores and convenient stores. You know the ones. Where you would beg your mom for a quarter, put it in the slot, turn the dial, and get some cheap plastic toy that you would either break or accidentally swallow on the way home? Yeah those. The difference is that these are quite detailed, well crafted, and often very strange. Possible items you can receive range from cats dressed like pieces of sushi to women having their body parts flattened. Need I say more? Unfortunately, I did not grab any pictures of these machines or my prizes. Those are for me. All for me.
We left from that little shop and continued down the street. We walked by a fingurine store and Hector decided to pop in and look for something for his brother. As we walked in, I noticed something odd in the front window.
So those are a thing. The rest of the shop contained figures from all sorts of anime in a variety of sizes. Once again, I had almost no idea what I was seeing, but it was fun to look at. And that's really a big part of the reason I went in the first place. As we left, I caught sight of another strange figurine, snapped a photo, and went back about my business.
A bit further down the road was a shop with all sorts of manga. I have a cousin who is (or at least was) very much into these graphic novels. Like anime, the genres and stories are vast and varried. You're likely to find something you love, but deciding "I think I'll start reading manga" is like saying "I think I'll start watching TV". There is just a lot out there. That was made extremely clear just by the existence of this store, which went up at least three floors. Each floor had manga from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and everything in between. I thought it was so amazing that I turned to Hector and said "Okay let's leave now." I don't read manga.
We stopped into a few other small places including another figuring store and a second-hand camera store. We made stops at various camera places throughout the day to keep an eye out for a suitable replacement for my broken Rokinon. It was actually in this search for a lens that we came across a multi-floor hobby shop. Before you waste your time reading ahead to find out if I found a lens at this place, let me tell you I didn't. Isn't that courteous of me? You could have gone through this whole paragraph waiting for me to wow you with the story of how I found the gold mine of lenses in a small shop tucked away in the middle of Akihabra. But I didn't. I found a lens at Bic Camera later that day and that whole story is boring. We did discover two things. One cool. One not so cool.
The cool thing: model cars. Sure, there are model cars everywhere. You want to find and build a model of an old Cadillac DeVille? You can probably knock all of that out in a day. But what if you like the look of an every day boring car, laying frame on pavement and sporting some flashy and expensive wheels? Where are those model cars? I found them.
Your personal preference in car modding may be different. But to me, these were cool. And for the equivilant of $17 to $21 USD, not terribly expensive. If I had the undying urge to pay an extra $200 to check an additional bag on my flight back to the States, I'd probably have purchased one or two.
The not so cool: well, you'll find out. After we found the cars, we kept on our search for the cameras. Up one floor we found more models - trains, gundams, etc. Up another floor and there were airsoft rifles and everything that goes along with that hobby. No cameras. So we went up another floor. As the elevator door opened, I saw a clothing rack with camo jackets. I figure there will be no camera bits here either, but there's no harm in checking it out anyway. A few more steps in and I begin to hear thrash metal over the speakers. Not something you hear often anywhere, let alone in Japan. Skip and jump a few more steps and we find more camo. And by more camo, I mean all of the camo. If camouflage clothing was something that needed to be harvested, in a field, under the proper conditions, during the right time of year, then I found the field where they grow it. The store was labeled as something of a one stop shop for military apparel. Which military? All of them. If you're asking yourself where you can go to get a Confederate flag and a Nazi armband in the same transaction, well have I got the place for you. The presence of Nazi and seemingly white supremicist paraphernalia was pretty far at the bottom of the list of things I expected (or wanted) to see on this trip.
I feared that staying there any longer would place me under some kind of government surveillance or on a no-fly list. We promptly left. Just as we did, the sun was taking a dive into the horizon and the various stores were closing down. That's when we finally found the floor with the camera equipment. It was already closed. Discouraged, we went back to the station, rode our way to a Bic Camera where I bought a 10-24mm Tamron and Hector bought a 70-200mm Tamron, rode our way to Tatsumi station, and walked our tired bodies across the river back to our apartment to rest up for the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment