Jason in Akihabara

This day can be well characterized by the term “over-stimulation”. Here’s what we got up to:

• Walked around and looked at some shops in our little neighborhood of Higashi-Nakano. We ended up having breakfast at a place where you order and pay via a machine outside, and then bring your ticket inside, where they make your food and serve it to you at a counter. It’s very utilitarian, but there’s something sort of charming about it.
• Went to Hedgehog Cafe Harry, which I’ve written about in a separate post. This was unbearably cute, despite being awkward and even a little painful at times.Check out the Instagram Round-up for today, for more photos.
• Walked around Roppongi Hills, a super fancy shopping center, and maybe because  of our awesome meal yesterday we just didn’t even want to try to follow that with anything in that realm. So, we went to McDonald’s. I kind of feel like it’s a good idea to try it every new country (as long as you’re there for a little while and it’s not one of a few select meals you’re going to have there). It was alright.
• Went to Akihabara and spent way too much time at Yodobashi Camera (a huge electronics store). Then we went out and tried to see the rest of the neighborhood. We checked out Super Potato and some other places. There’s just way too much to see, and Jason said he’s going to have to come back later sometime.
• I can’t quite remember why I felt we needed to do this, but we capped they day by going to the Robot Restaurant. Not so much a restaurant as it is a show where it seems like someone said “How can we cram as much high-wattage insane Japanese stuff as possible into one performance?” If you can imagine a sort of live-action anime, plus Gogol Bordello, plus Kaiju Big Battel, plus animatronic vehicles and a light show… well, it’s sort of like that.

• After that we were on sensory overload, but luckily we were just a 30 minute walk from our place, so we had a peaceful walk home through some quiet areas and then passed out pretty quickly.

Walking tally: Fitbit says I walked 23.5k steps today, which is over 10 miles. That’s a total of 46 miles of walking for the trip so far.

Photos:

• Check out the photos I posted to Instagram this day.
• And there are a lot more photos from this day in this set on flickr (with photos from June 2nd & 3rd also)