Day 3

Once again, my day begins at 3am, after a long and comfortable sleep atop my futon palace. Wide awake and raring to go, it`s a short 4 hours until Simon and I depart for our second attempt at conquering Tokyo Metro. On the list of things to buy in Akihabara, a laptop and cellphone were high on my list of priorities. I had once again done my research on which subway we needed to take and where we needed to go, but once again I was ill prepared.

For some reason, with no time constraints whatsoever, we randomly decided to travel in Tokyo in the middle of transit rush hour. It seemed that a majority (if not all) people in Japan have a tap-and-go transit card, which we had heard about from our landlord the day before. We both really wanted to get these cards to make our lives easier, and part of me knew it wasnt going to be as easy as buying a single ticket.

There were 3 machines, 2 of which had pictures of 2 different cards, Passmo and Suica. With a 50/50 shot I decided to test my luck with the passmo card. 2000 yen, 2 cards, 1 lost reciept, a confused tokyo metro employee and a broken passmo card dispenser were among the things that fell victim to my Gaijinitis (foreigners disease). Simon, my trusty "waits for me to get it right before trying" partner, was for some reason much more efficient in his escapades. So we walked down to the subways, and travelled in a classic 1 stop back, 5 stops forward fashion with the help of 2 very coordinated transit commissioners manning the gates to the east/west stations. At this point we knew we had to transfer but it was only 1 stop north and neither of us were feeling the confidence for round 2. So we surfaced.

Akihabara really is everything I was expecting. Even though we arrived well before most of the shops were open, the atmosphere was electric. We had a quick meal at Mos Burger (which incidentally was one of the restaurants I really wanted to try here in Japan, and we walked in by sheer luck) and then stopped by some arcades before arriving at Softmac, which I can only describe as a multi level Best Buy.

Cell phones were first and foremost our most desired piece of technology, so we b-lined it for the Keitai section. The employees were very helpful, and after sifting through their many translation strategies (including phone apps and a 3 way game of telephone) we were almost ready to sign the papers for our new best friends when they realized we didn't have anything with our address on it. Better luck next time, so we went to the other sections and drowned our sorrows with laptops and tvs.

Electronics in hand, we were exhausted and on route to the station when we were pulled aside by representatives of Japan TV and interviewed about our favourite animes. I got to do an awesome impression of a Kamehameha, and Simon was praised for his extensive knowledge of the field. After that we were absolutely otsukare (a very common Japanese word for exhausted). So the day had come to an end, ... at 2pm.

It wasn't the most successful day of shopping, and we may have came home with a few items we didn't mean to (I had accidentally purchased crown glasses from Mcdonalds when trying to upsize our small-sized medium drinks to medium-sized large drinks), but overall it was an amazing first experience, and we plan on going back tomorrow to retrieve the illusive japanese Keitai.

Ganbarimasu!