Japan - Day Three

Day three in Japan was spent somewhat in Tokyo, before heading off to the mountain town of Hakone. Once again, we met Alex and Daryl, somewhat tired from the night before but ready for another day of adventure. Since we didn't quite make it to Akihabara, the anime and shopping capital of Tokyo, we decided to head there for today and have a look around. We took the train there which didn't take long at all, roughly around 20 minutes.

Akihabara was a really packed place, with multitudes of stores cramped into a relatively small space. One of the first stores we went to was a multi level building filled with all kinds of anime and videogame related materials. It was around seven floors of stuff, with each floor broken down into different groups of items. For example, one floor had all the DVDs, one had comics or manga, and one had all the figurines and collectible stuff. The last one I mentioned caught my interest the most, with lots of the anime collectible items I was interested in - Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, and all the Final Fantasy related stuff. I decided to splash out and buy a huge FFVII Cloud and Daytona Motorcycle replica, as well as a couple of the Evangelion's. Also I got a model of Odin from FFIX. They had large figurines from almost all the Final Fantasy series, as well as all the jewelry items like rings and pendants which was pretty cool. I would have got more stuff but I wouldn't have been able to bring it all back. I also grabbed some small collectible figurines which will make pretty good gifts.

For the rest of the day I had to drag around my huge bags of stuff that I had bought, so that wasn't so much fun. We went to one of the many "Maid Cafe"'s which is basically just a Cafe, but the workers wear these maid or anime style clothes which was funny. You can even get them to perform magic tricks or get a polaroid picture with them.

After all this excitement we headed to Ueno park, which is a fairly huge park in the middle of the city. There were lots of little temples and places to look around there, which made a nice break from the hectic busy city. There are a lot of soft serve icecream stalls around which are good, they seem to offer so many different flavours. Some of them I would probably be slightly wary of however, like the black sesame or tofu. But I may be wrong, they might be good after all.. who knows.

Later in the day we had to quickly pack up and get ready to take a taxi to the main Tokyo Station, where we would catch the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) to Odawara. After lots of dragging heavy suitcases around, we eventually got some tickets and waited for the train. The Shinkansen are massive trains which can go extremely fast, around 300km/hr. In fact according to Wikipedia, they hold the record speed for going 581km/hr on a test run which is absolutely ridiculous. Even traveling around 300km/hr feels really fast, because of the speed you can hear the air roaring around the train and you literally feel as though you are on an airplane taking off. The trip didn't take very long at all, only around 15 minutes to travel a reasonable distance.

After we got to Odawara things became a little more difficult. We had to transfer to another train to get to Hakone, but the station people advised us it would be better to take a bus instead. After a lot of time searching around for where to go, we finally found the bus. The bus trip took just under an hour and was horrible. The bus had to travel the extremely windy mountain roads in the rain on incredibly narrow streets. I have no idea how the driver could drive as fast as he did and turn as sharply as he did without losing traction on the slippery roads, but it sure made me travel sick.

We got dropped off at a deserted stop in the rain, and had no idea how to get to the hotel. After walking around for quite awhile getting wet, dragging really heavy suitcases, we finally found a place to call a taxi. Turns out the company only had one taxi in service so we had to wait quite awhile to get the ride. Safe to say I was rather glad to finally arrive at the hotel. The next day would be spent exploring the Hakone area, which is a mountain town near Mount. Fuji.