Day Thirteen: Final Shopping Run, and Kabuki Theatre
Posted by Trejkaz Sat, 21 Oct 2006 04:07:47 GMT
(Finally, some time for more catch-up.)
Day thirteen was my last full day in Tokyo. As there were a number of things people had requested me to find that I hadn’t found yet, I decided to devote the middle of the day to one last shopping spree, as the evening was already covered by a booking to go see a play at the Kabuki theatre.
As the shops I was looking to visit all opened at staggered hours, there was the opportunity to get to each place during the first hour or so of opening time, taking the train between each location in time for the next one to open. This plan would work unless I got hung up on some store or another.
I ran down to Tokyu Hands right before its opening time of 10:00. I had the feeling that they had hanafuda decks because I recalled that they did have a game section with a large collection of other traditional type games. Turns out that they did have the Nintendo brand decks, and what was really lucky is that they had the highest quality sort. I bought four decks, two red and two black. (¥2,100 per deck) I’ll keep one red and one black for myself. :-)
I also bought some other cheesy stuff there which is probably best left unmentioned. No, I didn’t buy a model of a glass of beer, although it was really tempting to do so. And no, I didn’t buy a fake afro either.
Got out of there by 10:15, got to the train station by 10:25 and made it to Akihabara before 11:00 when most of the shops open there. Ran straight to the nearest game store to pick up a copy of Gundam Battle Royale for PSP which XF had asked for (I don’t own a PSP, you see… my Sony boycott is still holding.) Probably paid slightly more than I had to (¥4,300 or so) but time was limited.
Once that was out of the way I was on a mission to try and find a decent cat headband, but I failed it. What I did find in Cospa Akihabara though was another of the white on black Haruhi silhouette t-shirt which Conrad had asked me to get him. (¥2,900) I also found another t-shirt I’d never seen before (¥2,900) which I picked up for myself (I own four Haruhi t-shirts now, if you include the one I custom made.) I hadn’t expected to find such a large collection of t-shirts in what was presumably supposed to be a costume store.
Still unable to find any decent merchandise related to Welcome to the NHK!, nor Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. About time to give up on those.
For some reason I spent more time than necessary in Akihabara (honestly I have no idea where the time goes) so it was 11:45 or so when I finally got back to the station. Caught the train straight back to Shibuya, returning to the hotel to drop off the loot and then heading out to Cospa Shibuya.
Cospa Shibuya is a much more impressive costume shop than Cospa Akihabara. Not what you would expect at all. They had a lot of props and full costume sets for various characters. They also had various animal headbands (kemonomimi, if you must use that term ;-p) but I’m too picky so I didn’t buy anything. They seem to do custom jobs, so that might be one way to go about it… but I’m not desperate.
Eventually returned to the hotel some time around 14:00 and rested my feet.
Left again at around 16:30 for a bit of a mini-tour. It couldn’t really be called a tour because it didn’t involve seeing many places… I only handled it as a tour so that I didn’t need to think about transport and organising dinner (put it down to laziness again.)
We had dinner at a restaurant on the pier, the name of which I have forgotten. The food was good, but not fantastic. The umeshu they served with the food was fantastic, though. :-)
After dinner we moved onto Kabukiza to watch the night’s performance. Due to the screw-up on the previous week I’d been unable to catch a performance without paying extra for better seats, so I was looking forward to it.
Somehow we missed the start of the performance by a bit… we were making good time, too. Anyway, it was an amusing show. I managed to understand half of it, but what made it even easier was the earpiece I had in running an English guide, which didn’t actually translate everything but gave more information about what was going on than we were able to see. Very handy.
After the show, returned to the hotel by train, too buggered to do anything else for the night, so I just spent the rest of the night relaxing.