Tokyoooooooo!

We’ve been here for two days now and it is AWESOME!

The flight and trip to the Sakura Ikebukuro Hotel on Tuesday both went very smoothly. Our room is nicer than I imagined, given that it was the cheapest one I could find that still had a private bathroom (albeit one of space-station-worthy compactness), and the bed is surprisingly comfortable. The pillow has a regular smooshy top, with a layer of beans underneath that forms to the shape of your head, and I really want to buy one for home…

Yesterday we started off by visiting the Ginza and Marunouchi areas. Ginza is a high-end fashion district and wouldn’t generally be our cup of tea, but I wanted to visit Hakuhinkan Toy Park, and JSR needed to stop by the Apple store to buy a new charger for his laptop. The Apple store was full of clean young people in brightly coloured t-shirts, and met our shiny white requirements. I was slightly disappointed by Hakuhinkan, which didn’t have anything I wanted to buy, but I knew there would be other toy stores on the trip.

We ate our very first macarons from Dalloyau in the Mitsukoshi department store. Nobody sells macarons in Auckland and I’ve been dying to try them after reading so much online. They were delicious, with a lightly crispy outer shell and a soft chewy center, and now I know what they are meant to be like I’ll try and bake my own at home.

Trying to get lunch in Marunouchi was mildly disastrous, with lots of wrong turns and renovation work in stations changing the exit layouts and confusion about whether landmarks were above or below ground. We finally got to the conveyor sushi place I had been recommended – conveyor sushi is excellent for skirting the language barrier, and even the cheapest kind is amazing. We also visited the Meiji 100% Choco Cafe, who make 56 varieties of chocolate. We bought little blocks of six kinds, two of which we’ve tried so far. “Maple” was yum, and “Cheese” was, um, not so much. But who could pass up the opportunity to try cheesey chocolate? Four more to go, including “Black Pepper” and “Lemon Salt”….

Today we headed to Yamashiroya in Ueno, another large toy store. This one was much better than Hakuhinkan and I made several small purchases – some San-X stickers, tiny Rody figurines, a blind-box toy of the Capybara character who amuses me so much, and a couple of presents. I also succumbed to a gashapon capsule machine (no doubt the first of many), again for the Capybara, and ended up with a little plushy. Capsule machines are a lot of fun – they’re cheap, and it’s kind of like a game, but you’re guaranteed to get a prize. Whee!

We spent the rest of the day in Akihabara. This is the district famous for its “Electric Town”, and it has all the geekery you can imagine, from alleyways of tiny, absurdly specialised outlets for various types of electrical component to enormous multi-story anime and manga stores. JSR was entranced! We don’t need any more gadgets, so it was pretty much browsing only, but we each went for another capsule toy.

Tomorrow we will be visiting Shibuya and I’m really looking forward to Loft and Tokyu Hands! The promised internet access in our room has not eventuated and we have to go down to the lobby to use the wi-fi, so I may not blog again for a little while, but I’m still checking my email at least once a day.

P.S. Photos will be coming once we get home – I forgot to bring the cord to connect our camera to the laptop! Oops! I could buy another one but it seems like a needless expense as we already have two at home, and our memory card is large enough to store a trip’s worth of pictures.