April 5

Monday was rainy and icky. We had brought only one umbrella, so our walk to our first planned activity of the day - my flower arrangement class - was a somewhat miserable one. Our guidebook had said that there was a flower arrangement museum in the same building that my class would take place, so we went a bit early to take a look at the museum, and to get Erik situated with his laptop, before my class started. When we got to the building, we couldn't seem to determine the location of the museum, so we did our usual: take the elevator, stop at every floor until we see something interesting, and hope to all heck that we don't get caught somewhere we aren't supposed to be because I haven't learned, "Sorry I'm a dumb American, and I don't know where I'm going. Please don't kick me out of the building" in Japanese yet. We were unsuccessful, and as such decided to continue to our next destination: Sunshine City.

Sunshine City is a huge mall complex (often called a city-within-a-city) built on the site of a former prison. It comes complete with amusement park, movie theater, aquarium, observatory, 60 floors of offices, and of course the typical mall shops and restaurants. The fact that it was indoors - and in fact titled "Sunshine City" - made it seem a good option on that rainy day.

The first thing we did once there is get something to eat. I tricked Erik into trying Japanese curry (yeah!), and he actually liked it (double yeah!).

I didn't get too many pictures of the mall, sadly (I guess that goes to show the frame of mind we were in that day), but suffice it to say that it is the biggest mall I have ever been in (move over Ontario!). I did some browsing through some shops, bought another umbrella, etc. We saw plenty of Engrish clothing articles:


In case you can't read it, the shirt says: "Complicated monkey business on days that end in annoying" and has a picture of an explosive.

We were also intrigued by the amusement park portion of the mall, which is called Namjatown, and had a little cat mascot:


Not knowing what it was, we went in. From what we were able to discern, there was a lot of food, a portion that looked haunted with little cat ghosts (definitely happening at my place this Halloween), and a portion that looked like you could pay to get a massage. Still not knowing what it was, we left. Here's a picture, maybe you can figure it out:


After a bit more perusing in shops and balking at the price of Japanese clothing, we left Sunshine City, and headed out to Akihabara.


Akihabara is widely known to be nerd's paradise. It is a few blocks densely packed with electronics shops (everything from computer components to new ipods to police radios), girls on the street dressed as anime characters handing out flyers, cosplay/anime shops, maid cafes, and huge multistory arcades like this one:


We had a lot of fun in Club Sega. For starters, the first two ENTIRE FLOORS were filled with these games:


Yes, two whole floors of the claw game. Machines were filled with giant snack foods, plushies, and anime babe figurines.

We also saw the biggest tetris game known to man (or at least to us)...


...many many rhythm games (often with unhumanly good Japanese players attached)...

There were also about 3 floors of fighting games. They had the newest Street Fighter game (not impressed), as well as Tekken. An interesting thing about these arcades is that the fighting games seem to be networked together, such that after playing the CPU for a few rounds, you are automatically entered into a showdown with another actual player on the network. We spent more 100 yen tokens than I would like to admit playing Tekken.