As you can imagine, when it come to electronics there's no where in the world bigger than Japan and anything you could ever think of cell phone, computer, electronics wise available over here.
We went to the area known as Electric City, our first stop was a huge building with a floor plan space of your local Wal-Mart, however, not only is the floor that big there's NINE floors! each floor devoted to different types of electronics, Computers had a floor, as did Home AV, Toys, Appliances, Cameras and more.
Just one aisle on one floor!
When you go into somewhere like Best Buy or Target in the USA there's usually like a choice of two or three of each item, this place there's at least 30 of each, the selection in unbelievable. There was a whole aisle devoted just to keyboards and there must have been at least 200 different shapes sizes and colours.
At the hotel we are staying at they only have LAN wired internet in the room, they charge an extra $20 a day for a WiFi router, there's no way we were paying that amount and said we should be able to pick one up in Electric City for a lot less. We found the Wifi routers an the choice was amazing, so much so we had to find an English speaking assistant to help us out. We told him what we wanted, portable, router, small cheap. Within seconds he came back with the smallest thing I've ever seen, its half the size of a cigarette packed and was $25!! it was perfect, exactly what we needed for the room.
Mark and Kami have been here before and kept telling me we must make it to the floor with the massage chairs, I've seen these before and expected a small chair with a roller that goes up and down on your back. WOW how wrong was i, there were like full leather living room chairs and massaged every single part of your body including your neck and head. We headed over to the foot massagers, there we about 20 different kinds, everyone was trying them out and within a couple of minutes Kami, Mark and i were each sat with our feet been massaged in the most amazing way you can imagine. The groans, sighs, ahh’s and smiles must have been seen and heard throughout the city!
We got choice!! Mark in pure ecstasy
To anyone that hadn't read the above paragraph I’ve no idea what on earth they would be thinking was going on here!!
We swapped and changed machines and must have been there for nearly an hour and we didn't even try the chairs, just the foot ones.There were people sleeping in the chairs and even a guy next to us fell asleep in the foot one much to the amusement of his friends all taking pictures of him and what looked like posting them on facebook.
We found the video camera floor and Mark put some 3D glasses on that were hooked up to a 3D TV and then to a 3D video camera. Wow, id never seen anything like it, it was as good if not better as you see at the movies! Again, there wasn't just one 3D video camera, i counted 16 of them!
Mark wanted to replace Ziggy with the pet below, a cute little iphone dog that doesn't mess in the house, doesn't pester and doesn't wake you up at 5am in the morning, Ziggy, you should be worried!! Want a samurai sword to go along with your new 55” flat screen ? sure we got em!
We spent probably close to 2 hours on the huge store before leaving and heading out to the main street that was full of the smaller stores but still compared to the US they were large by comparison.
Any type of cable or wire you could ever want Same goes for light bulbs!
When Kami lived in Tokyo she would play these arcade “claw” games, they are everywhere here and you insert 100yeh (just over a dollar) and try to get a claw type thing to pick up whatevers in the machine and drop it down a slot, that's all it is, nothing more, nothing less. But people play this is their thousands, feeding 100 Yen coins in one after the other to try “win” something that would cost 200Jen down the street!! It was funny watching as within minutes Kami got Mark addicted and the prospect of the claw winning had Mark feeding the coins in determined to get a small fury animal toy, but as always(well most times) the machine won!
Kami owns this city!! Clawing the money in!
We passed shop after shop selling electronic and also girl after girl trying to get people into the “maid cafes” that they have here.These are bars where your served by girls dressed as maids and made to feel like your been looked after and welcomed. As mark would say, they are “tease” cafe’s. they just want you to stay and buy their expensive beers while they come around and be nice to you all dressed up pretty.
Earlier on we had passed a” pub” called the Rose and Crown, obviously an English style pub right in the heart of Tokyo, we headed over there for a drink, but not before calling into another arcade to have a go on the claw machine, this time the prize was a paper Japanese fan! Although as you can see on the video below the fan was still in the machine, after another 400 yen, Mark finally had it beaten and was holding his prize!
After a $12 pint of beer and a good half hour sat people watching up above the plaza at the Rose and Crown pub we decided to take the metro back over to an area we passed through in the taxi the night before for a bite to eat for diner. Took us a good 45 minutes to find a place and we ended up in a small downstairs basement that was a Japanese version of an Italian restaurant. It wasn't like we had had in Rome or Milan but the food was ok and filled an empty space:)
Cool sculpture Waiting for the metro heading back Adverts all over for this bar
Mark headed back to the hotel in a taxi, Kami and i wandered down one of the streets full of bars, shops and places to eat, calling in a few shops on the way. We then walked the couple of mile back to the hotel.
Full album of day 3 pictures below:
Love the "we got choice" annotation! :)
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