Electric City, Tokyo day 3 continued….

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:

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Panorama of Shibuya, Tokyo

 

Panorama taken from the 19th floor of the Excel hotel in Shibuya, with roof top soccer field!

  

Tokyo, day 3….

I was awake at 5am, i wrote a couple of blog posts and went down to the pool at 7am, signed in on the sheet, the girl checked my room number and name and said ok, then pulled (very politely) a laminated sheet from under the counter with the list of charges on it for the use of the pool and the gym! $23 to use the pool and $40 to use the pool and gym!  As much as i do like nice hotels it just irks me so much, not when they actually charge for things like this but when they charge so much! i wouldn't mind paying $10 but $23 for a swim! Its always the nice expensive hotels that do this too, you go to a Days Inn and while the service and rooms are nowhere near as good, you get free Wi-Fi, free pool, free breakfast etc!

I declined the charge (politely of course)  signed out and headed back up to the room for a show. Kami was up but Mark was still sleeping. kami and her dad headed down for breakfast and Mark had a meeting in the lobby at 10am, this didn't last long and we all headed out of the room around 11ish.

We walked to the nearest Metro station, Tameikessano, and took the 20 minute rode to Akasakamitsuke, The ticket was about $2 and the metro was spotless, on time and efficient. You can tell the whole city is built for “smaller” people than Mark and i. I’m 6ft 2” and i think Marks about 6ft 4”, we towered over everyone's heads on the train, even knocking our heads and having to duck down under all the hanging advertising banners! I’m a huge people watcher and its great to not just watch people, but watch people of a totally different culture and the metro was a great place to just sit and watch people. EVERYONE has a smart phone out here and they all sit and use them on the Metro, its very rare people will ever make eye contact with you, as in any culture is considered rude to stare but even if you catch their eye and see Japanese people looking at you they will look down to the ground instantly and not look back.

View from our hotel room                                               Metro lines                                                                 Beware of cats!

      

As we got of the Metro and walked out of the entrance it was a mass of local people with the odd western tourist. We crossed the street to what looked like a market area but was the main walkway down towards the temple that we had come to see.The first thing i actually saw when we walked out of the station was 3 rickshaw type carriages parked up. As we crossed the street i looked to my right and got an great view of the new Tokyo Skytower that opened last month, unfortunately tickets were done on a lottery system for the first month until the middle of July so we’re unable to go up to the observation deck at the moment. its a HUGE tower and i believe the tallest free standing tower in the world. There was also a building with a huge gold sculpture on the top, Kami told me how this was known as the “turd”! it was originally meant to look like a flame on the top of the building but it proved too heavy to balance and was thus mounted on its side!

 

 

The main walkway upto the temple was packed with small stores, all with open fronts onto the street. There were places selling fans, kimonos, lucky items to leave at the temple and lots of strange food and drinks! The first thing we saw was a small store that sold one item only, It was a type of cake about 2” long, soft cake on the outside and a sweet black bean paste on the inside. These were made fresh by a machine that was hypnotic to watch, there were 5 or 6 people in the store and this one machine just churning out hundreds of the cake.

It took us at least an hour to walk the street to the temple. Mark bought a new hat, Kami was in her element looking at all the fans and Japanese things and i was just walking round open eyed at everything! When we left the hotel this morning it was cloudy and cool but by the time we’d got off the train and were wandering around the sun had come out and it was hot (hence Marks hat purchase) We had bought some of the small cakes earlier but i wasn't keen at all on these so when Mark saw some little lemon type cakes and asked if i wanted one i wasn't too sure at first, there's just no real way of telling what stuff is! its all in Japanese with no English descriptions at all so its just pot luck. As it happened the lemon cakes were nice, there was just a mouthful of cake that has some type of lemon paste in the middle. kami does know what a lot of the food things are but there's just so many that there’s still a lot she has no idea about.

Scary masks                                           Didn't have one but they looked nice!           Mark in his new hat

As we got to the temple Kami headed off to the Bathroom while Mark tried to find a trashcan, something which to say how clean Tokyo is is a very rare find! especially in the subway stations, due to bomb threats etc I sat and waited for them to return and people watched again.I watched the guy next to me light up a cigarette right next to one of the many no smoking signs where we were. We also saw all the gardeners  keeping the gardens tidy had these small round metal tin like things on their butts that would send smoke out every 20 seconds or so, these turned out to be a way of keeping the insects away whilst gardening! We joked how we should take one back for Beth and try explain to her that we had brought her a mosquito repellent back from Japan to save her getting bit while out in the garden but we had to strap it to her butt and set if on fire!! something I’m not sure would go down real well.

Rickshaw guys all looked pretty fit!             Finally, the temple!                                   Doh!!

As we got near the temple i could see people crowded around a small building and shaking these silver canisters.This is a huge thing in Japan, you put 100yen in a slot, pick up the canister that has about 25 chopstick type things in there's a hole in one end just large enough for one of them to fall out. When you get your “chopstick” there's a number written on it in Japanese.You then look for the corresponding number on the small wooden drawer in front of you that have numbers on them and take out one of the slips of paper inside. Its kind of like having your fortune told and there's good ones and bad ones, if you get a bad one then you tie it in a special way to a fence type unit that's next to the building. mine was pretty good and if you get a good one you don't tie it t the fence but keep hold of it.

Kami’s wasn't as good as mine so ended up tying it to the fence!

This was fortune paper:

 

There was a huge pot of incense at the entrance to the temple and your meant to stand by the side of it and wave the incense over you, didn't do much for me just made me cough! There's then a large fountain with small cups on the end of stick, you’re meant to take one of the cups, fill it with water and take a little sip, this is meant to cleanse your body before entering the temple.

Before you enter the temple, you take out a 5cent coin and throw it in a large collector and i guess make a wish! lucky pieces of wood to buy, 100 jen to be told your gonna have bad luck, 5 yen here, 5 yen there, its just one big cash cow! We wandered around the temple and its garden for 20 minutes before heading back out down a different street in search of food and drink!

Temple                                                                                                             Group shot!

 

We found a great little outdoor eating place along a street filled with bars and places to have a snack. As we sat down the lady pointed out that she didn't have a menu written in English, that was fine, little did they know we had our secret weapon, Japanese speaking Kami:) mark and i ordered two cold beers and left the food choice up to Kami.

     

Kami ordered some French fries, chicken on a stick and some ramen noodles, all of which were amazing and Mark and i commented on how both of us could just sit there for the rest of the day with cold beer, good food, company and excellent people watching! Sadly we had other things to do and headed off  back down the busy streets after an hour but not before seeing more weird sights

Tall Japanese person!                                 Corgi in boots                                            Why ?

   

We took a cab to our next port of call which took maybe 15 minutes at the most. As you can imagine, Japan is the centre of the world when it comes to electronics and we were heading to that very centre,  Electric city!

To be continued….