Akihabara & The Weekend

Let's see...we last left me off on the final day of my long weekend. School was pretty much same ol' on Thursday and Friday. That is, tiring and leaving me energy-less. I don't think I'll ever get used to waking up so early. On Friday I had a trial lesson with someone new. Technically I was on time, but I made a mistake on where we were supposed to meet and I was a bit late to the lesson. ><; I hope that didn't reflect too badly, because even though he paid me despite it being a free trial, he still hasn't contacted me to schedule a second lesson yet.

Daniel and I decided we should start doing some more sight seeing again (though I guess Daniel got his fair share since he got to see the Gundam on Wednesday!), so we headed to Akihabara. Daniel took me to some of the places he visited on the tour his school hosted.

I managed to get a shot of this small shrine in the compact little shopping area directly under the JR train tracks. It's amazing how many little shops were jammed packed in that little place! You could buy any electronic part you could ever dream of in there.

I managed to grab a few random pictures.

That there is an arcade. There were so many arcades there! Now that I mention it though, it's kind of amazing how many pachinko parlors and regular arcades that are an extension of pachinko parlors there are here. There's at least two nearby one of the train stations near where I live.

And that would be a ginormous adult entertainment store.

And this is a several stories tall internet cafe.

We headed into a building which was filled with hobby stores. By hobby, I mean figurines, models, and dolls and such~

They had this awesome-looking statue of the main hero from North of the Fist Star. Right inside were these gorgeous statues of Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld from Oh! My Goddess but all stores have a policy of no picture-taking so I couldn't take any pictures of them. 。゜(゜´Д｀゜)゜。

Around this area was a vending machine, where Daniel bought a drink that tasted like pancakes. It was surprisingly really, really good!

And around the corner from the shop was another shop where we spied this display...

Persona 3 and Persona 4 mini-keychains!! I'm a huge fan of these games, so naturally I bought us a whole box of them.

The box is so cute!

And lucky us, we got all twelve of them with no repeats! With these kinds of things there's always a chance you might get a repeat. We got really, really lucky.

Anyway, back to the store...

Around the corner was a "wanted" poster for completed and painted models that the store would buy, as well as the price they were willing to pay for them. You see, these kinds of models come in a box in parts, and you assemble and paint the figure on your own. It's amazing how they'll pay 15,000 yen for an Elizabeth figure.

After leaving, we made our way down and found the AKB48 theater next to Donki. We went inside Donki to see if they had Diamond Lashes, since I'm down to my last pair of Fairy Eye. However, they didn't have any Diamond Lashes, though I'm considering trying Dolly Wink this time. In any case, since I had spent so much money on the Persona 3/4 keychain box, I decided maybe it'd be best if I stopped spending money that day.

We ended up stopping at a few arcades and tried out this popular new arcade game called Jubeat. Basically you tap these tiles that light up with the music. It's actually pretty fun, though I kept making three mistakes per song so I kept getting a B score orz

We did manage to find an arcade with purikura machines! So we took our first purikura together~ Yay!! Unfortunately since our cell phones are prepaid, so we can't get the pictures sent to our cell phones and I'm stuck taking pictures of them like this.

After purikura, we saw that they had an old Dreamcast game called "Typing of the Dead" where the aim of it is to type in the words presented in order to defeat monsters attacking this town...or something ridiculous like that. We were typing out the words in romaji (roman letters), but eventually we just had no clue what we were typing in and it got increasingly difficult. Then we got to this point where in order to defeat a boss we had to spell out the correct answer to questions, and while I could eventually figure out the correct answer it took longer than the game was giving us.

At some point we stopped by a gift shop, where I managed to increase my Hello Kitty pencil and pen collection by one with one from Tokyo. This is the Akihabara version.

We stopped by Animate and Daniel bought me the newest issue of Aria. Unfortunately I missed last month's issue though. T~T After that, we headed to Burger King! I can't remember the last time I had Burger King anymore.

Compared to McDonalds, Burger King is much more "American," I would say. Even all of the advertisements are in English, though I'm not sure what's up with the plain French fry box. However, they don't sell milk shakes...instead they sell beer. Heineken, at that. I think Burger King is the only place where we've seen Heineken beer in Japan. Since they didn't have milk shakes I got melon soda and  a whopper with only ketchup. It tasted pretty similar to its American counterpart.

After that we headed home for the day on Saturday.

Sunday I stayed in until I had my lesson. He was even kind enough to buy us donuts after the lesson was over. And then Monday and Tuesday were the same old routine, and here I am at last to Tuesday, which means my day off is tomorrow. At long last. I was so tired I ended up crashing shortly after I got home and slept until 5pm.

I'm thinking tomorrow I want to go out to buy a new hat. We'll see.