Akihabara (aka. Every geeks wet dream)

I'll leave fun with the Tokyo transportation system to my next entry ... so I just appear in the exit of Akihabara train station *puff*

Nothing much right at the train station just a few buildings a lot of people. I spotted a lot more people just down the road. I head for the crowd and run right into Electric Town. Calum gave a good description; let me recite something like it:

Imagine say Granville market, with all the fruits and food and cooking supplies replaced with cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, digital multi-meters, computers, and computer parts ... whatever your hearts desire. They should have sent a poet!

So I start browsing electronics shops, at first purposefully looking for a camera. But in about the first shop I also decided that these phones they had looked pretty cool, and they had some awesome flat panel screens. Anyway, camera phones seem to be all the rage, since I saw them on display at about every shop. Distracted from my original goal I just browse though the market aimlessly, until I find myself in a shop packed to bursting with Anime, I mean I could hardly manoeuvre though the place with all the DVDs stacked up in there. At that point I felt distinctly bad about not knowing anything about Anime ... bummer. Anyway back to browsing electronics.
So I am looking at some digital video cameras, then some cameras, cabling, and I find myself standing at a shelf filled with porn, complete with creepy old guy comfortably browsing the selection ... in the middle of the crowed milling through Akihabara. At this point I noticed the crowd again, and could not help but think: "All these people must be geeks! I can't believe there is this many geeks in one place, or in the world. Sw33t!" Then I felt really bad about not being able to speak Japanese well. I would have loved to chat up some of these geeks, especially the cosplaying girls, or at least congratulate them on their costumes.

To take a break from shopping I walked into something that looked like a food court to me. Well there was a few places to get good and a lot of machined that looked like prize-retrieval-stations. I spot a stairwell going up, so with some junk food in hand I wonder up the stairs ... and walk right into a huge arcade, well the second floor of the arcade actually (I found a couple of fun old side-scrollers on the fifth floor, and some gundam-wing simulators on the 2nd floor, 100 yen per game) About an hour later I forced myself back out of the arcade ... that was tough. Anyway I head across the street into something that looks like a manga shop, and it was ... 7 floors dedicated to Mange, Anime, and Videogames (again mostly PS2 games). Just to spoil the surprise ... I picked up some random cool looking stuff for Amber and Shawn ;)

The rest of the afternoon I browsed through more electronics shops, found video games stores that somewhat reminded be of EB on just about every corner. Some of them had separate floors for women's games! I had to check those out just to see if there actually are many girl gamers in Akihabara. What do you know: I felt what the average girl must feel like in an EB in Vancouver. This place was packed with chicks that were clearly gamers ... generally they cared more about hygiene then their male counterparts though, well at least the air seemed much more perfumed and clean then the average comic-shop smell I would have been used to from the men's games floor.

I walked into another 5-story arcade (or at least I only made it to the fifth floor by the time I realized I had to run off to catch my bus). On the way to the subway I found a Donut shop. Intrigued by this Japanese Donut idea I walked in had a coconut cream donut that tasted pretty much like what you would expect from a coconut cream donut. I also purchased a 5-fish sandwich looking thing. It was quite tasty. Conclusion: If you are a geek you will find anything you my need at Akihabara, except for RPGing supplies, I guess D&D has not corrupted the Japanese youth jet. Either way Akihabara rox!

By the time I was back in the bus I recalled that I was supposed to buy a camera there ... dammit, I guess I will just have to go back :)