Days Eight and Nine: Weekend Cut Short by Tiredness and Rain
Posted by Trejkaz Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:30:11 GMT
I originally had more plans for the weekend, but it turned out being much more quiet than I’d originally planned.
Went shopping at Tokyu Hands. Impulse bought a bottle rocket launcher kit (¥5,250) including some spare connectors in case I lose one set. I’ve never seen this sort of thing in Australia, although I do hear they exist in the US. This particular kit is Japanese made though, and rather sweet looking when the rocket itself is well built. Should be fun anyway, good way to kill some time that doesn’t involve sitting around doing bugger all, although I guess at the end of the day it’s still a fairly geeky project.
I also found a sweet blue LED clock (shows the date and time on a scrolling blue LED display) for ¥14,000 but decided against it for cost and space requirements. It would be nice… I’m still considering it. I can’t find it on Google anyway.
I was actually looking for laser stuff, but didn’t find a single thing. Did find a lot of interesting random crap though. You can buy the models of food and beer which are displayed out the front of restaurants. The beer looks pretty realistic except that it the bubbles obviously don’t move. :-)
I also finally managed to check out Mandarake here, and their Shibuya branch is rather impressive. They had all sorts of tempting stuff but nothing that I felt the need to buy on the spot.
Saturday night was spent in. I actually checked out several other stores in the area for random stuff, and there were a lot of steps. My legs were killing me…
Sunday morning I went on a mission to Jimbocho to find a specialist game shop called Okuno Karuta (nearer Suidobashi) station which focuses on traditional Japanese games. They had many neat card games. I was actually looking for hanafuda but the sort I was after weren’t to be found. I’m dead certain they’re still around though. I still have a few toy stores which I want to check out for other reasons so it can’t hurt to look around in those too.
What was interesting about Okuno Karuta though was its extensive collection of tarot decks. Really odd, considering that the store is supposed to be focusing on games. Know many interesting games you can play with a tarot deck? :-)
And then at around midday Sunday it started to rain, so doing anything else became a problem.
Food was mostly bought from convenience stores these past two days, partially to save money, but also out of laziness. But you’d be surprised how many noodles a ~¥250 cup of noodles contains – easily 3-4 times the number of noodles of a normal cup. Cheap and effective (I only just managed to eat it all.)
I also found the best rice crackers I’ve ever eaten – they taste like curry. At this rate, why use restaurants? They might only taste slightly better than this, Japanese cup ramen is surprisingly good compared to its western clones and I keep finding better snack food to eat. ;-)
I had planned to go to Ueno today. Perhaps I can still squeeze in a visit there for some other day.