Day Six: Free Day: Shop, Shop, Shop Dash!
Posted by Trejkaz Sat, 30 Sep 2006 06:29:43 GMT
Day six was the free day for the set tour, and even though there were many other options open to me, I decided to go and look for stuff to buy again.
The day went well, details are within. Actually, I’m writing this entry on the evening of day six as I’m catching up on my backlog. But you probably won’t have seen it until a day or two later, because I first need to (a) find some Internet access that doesn’t suck in a country which is allegedly well-connected, and (b) get all the previous entries checked and put up first.
I found the wifi hotspot in the hotel, but my laptop can’t connect to it so it’s as good as broken. Why can’t they just give us an ethernet jack and be done with it? I’d rather pay ¥500 per day for that than the same amount for wifi that doesn’t even connect.
…and as for what happened today…
First, off to Harajuku to properly check out a couple of places which we didn’t get time to see the other day. I got to experience rush hour trains… the pushers were doing their job of pushing people into the cars of the train. I somehow managed to get standing spot in a corner which was stable enough to play DS.
Unfortunately I arrived at 09:00, an hour before anything opens, so I had to waste time, and the only cafe which I found which was open was Starbucks… too bad. After wasting the best part of an hour drinking a coffee very slowly, I went back out to the shops.
I looked through Kiddy Land trying to find suitable plushies but didn’t find anything really good except a supreme Totoro, much bigger than the last one I’d found which was already bigger than the one I actually bought. I could only guess at the price of this biggest Totoro, as it didn’t have a price tag attached (which means it was supremely expensive… perhaps ¥50,000.)
I also checked out Book-Off for a moment but the amount of kanji was already starting to freak me out after only five minutes so I evacuated. It may have had more than books, DVDs and music, but at that point I wasn’t ready to try and find out.
Next, to Shinjuku, where I went to check out the Odakyu department store. After buying nothing at the department store I wandered around for a bit, and found more seedy DVD shops. Actually, the density of seedy shops was increasing quite steeply so I pulled out the GPS and found that I’d made it about half way from the station to the red light district. Time was starting to run out again so I forced myself to make it back to the station and besides, the day was still early (around 11:00 at this point.)
Then to Ikebukuro, which was skipped on the tour the other day due to a lack of time. I checked out the Tobu department store there too, as it is practically grafted onto the station. It looked more or less exactly like the other department store earlier in the day, and I started to wonder if all department stores look the same.
Interestingly though, Japanese department stores don’t put perfumes and cosmetics on the entry level, so it’s quite possible to make it to where you want to go without being assaulted by smelly samples. Also, and this probably goes without saying, but department stores sell alcohol. There was quite a bit of cheap sake available, although I didn’t pick any up at either location because I knew how much I would be walking around for the rest of the day.
The final step on the shopping run was Akihabara (this makes it my third visit there.) Originally I thought I would use this time to buy up doujin comics, but actually it turned out quite differently because I had remembered some other things I wanted to buy.
I spent some time looking through the various electronics shops for a portable media player which could play DIVX, and which had a video output on it. I must have searched at least eight different stores before finally giving up on that one. I found a few units which did handle DIVX, but not one of them had video out capability as well. I will just have to use a more expensive option from back home… I really thought Japan would have had these sorts of things.
Then I ran around looking for games to cross off my list. Apparently, my taste in games is quite similar to the norm, because it took some time to find what I was after. In one of the larger stores I bought a brand new copy of Jump Super Stars (¥4,180), which is still considered a current release even though it came out a very long time ago. I then discovered that both of the other games I was after were no longer current releases, so I would have to start searching second hand stores. I did search several larger second hand game stores, but had no luck. I was heading back to the station when I ran into some of the other people from our tour. We talked for a bit, and then some of them went into Club Sega while I went off to search again (why, I have no idea.) Turned out to be a good idea – on a side street I never would have seen, I found a tiny store which had both of the other titles I was after, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (¥3,980) and Electroplankton (¥3,980). Electroplankton came with cheesy headphones, too. Good to see that second hand game stores are just as big a scam over here as they are back home, price-wise… but it wasn’t like I was able to buy the games new, let alone back home.
I also found more awesome model shops (one of them had extensive collections of model trains, costing immense amounts of money but looking really cool) and quite a few more porno shops. Seriously, you can’t throw a cat in Akiba without hitting a porno shop.
At this point I was nearly dead so I returned to the hotel and did some catch-up on the blogging.