First Weekend

Saturday was a blast. First of all, I woke up really early to go to Ceatec. Vaso decided to be lazy and sleep in instead. I ended up going by myself. It cost me 900 yen to get to the convention center. That is fine and all, but it only cost me 500 yen to get back home via the same route. Talk about weird. The first thing I noticed as I stepped off the train was that everyone was going the same direction. I followed suit and they eventually led me to the convention center. That place was huge! There are three convention buildings each housing a different specialty: home entertainment, fancy new electronics, and the components that go into the fancy new electronics.

I went to the fancy new electronics first because it was closest. The first thing that struck me was the amount of different companies in this huge hall. There were the big ones like Panasonic and Microsoft, but there were also really tiny companies with some pretty cool electronics. The second thing that struck me were the booth babes. They were everywhere. The big companies had upwards of 15 while most of the smaller places had 1 or 2. I thought it was simply amazing that almost every single booth had at least 1.



So I walked around and enjoyed the geeky-ness that comes with every big conventions. I checked out the new TV's, mp3 players, phones, computers, and everything else that I could find. The bigger companies had a show about every half hour or so. They ranged from normal presentations to song and dance and even a magic show! It was very impressive.

After I had seen everything (or at least walked by it) I headed back home. I made a stop at Shinjuku to eat and meet Vaso and Miles. It took them a while to show up so in the meantime I went arcade hopping. There is a popular area in Shinjuku that has about 5 different arcades on the same block. If there is a game you want to play that is already taken, you can simply go on to the next arcade. I ran into Vaso and Miles while changing arcades. They apparently had plans to go to this bar / international party. I decided it would be a good chance to meet people.

I talked to a ton of different people at the party. Most of them were enamoured that I was attending Waseda University. The rest were just surprised at my Japanese ability (which I still do not think is very good.) The party ended around 10pm so we had to move elsewhere. We ended up just walking around until late.