A New Hobby

Today was a sad day. I had to wake up really early again (6:30 come on!) to get some grub and head on over to the hotel. I must say that I was dead tired. By the time I got there, mom was all packed and ready to head to the airport. I got to drag her small bag behind me so that made the day a little better. We made the 1 and a half hour trip to Narita Airport and got there around 9:30ish. I almost fell asleep a couple times along the way. Mom got all checked in and ready to go, but there was a slight problem. After taking a second look at the itinerary, we discovered her flight did not leave until 2 in the afternoon! We thought it left at noon... That is a whole 4 hours to kill! Since I had had a very small breakfast this morning (a piece of bread) we decided to eat lunch. Mom has been getting away from the whole "lets eat new and exciting foods" phase so I settled on the local Subway. I had the cream cheese roasted chicken and mom had the cajun chicken. We also ordered some potato wedges, something which would catch on in America if you ask me. I also found out that the subs are about the same as in American Subways. Everything is metric, so the normal sub is 15 centimeters long which translates to 5.90551181 inches. Very close to half a foot. I also admired the subs with hot dogs in them... Seriously >_<

Mom eventually decided to go through the final security checkpoint which queued my departure. I said my final goodbyes and headed back to Tokyo. Instead of going straight home I skipped the stop at Nippori and headed to Ueno Park. Once there I found that the place was insanely crowded. Today was the first day that shops were open after New Years, but a lot of the businesses are still closed so many people had the day off. I really wanted to visit the Robot Exhibit at the Science Museum, but the wait was over an hour just to get in! The other museums in the area were also packed, so I decided it was best just to leave. Since the day was still young, I headed over to Akihabara to do some game hunting.

Akihabara was also extremely crowded. What made it worse was the fact that the road was not blocked off to traffic so all the people crammed onto the sidewalks. There is also a tradition on New Years to sell "grab bags" of random stuff for cheap prices. Most of these are categorized by digital cameras, electronic dictionaries, laptops, etc. I was tempted to buy one, but I figured that it was probably just the crappy products that they couldn't sell. In any case, I managed to find a new retro game shop that is hidden down a back ally and on the third floor of a suspicious looking building. They had every single super famicom game I could ever want. They were also organized very nicely by the hiragana syllabary and even had the name on the side of each game so you didn't have to sift through all them! The only problem was that they were a bit more expensive than Mandrake over in Nakano. Most of the games were between 1000 - 2000 yen which is out of my price range. But in any case, I did manage to find some good deals and picked up some 500 yen games. Back on the streets I explored all the backroads and found a couple more tiny shops with a few retro games. I picked up around 10 total from a few different places. On my way back to the train station I spotted a vendor with tons of different wires and connectors. I remembered that I wanted to move the TV in my room by my desk so I can "study" and watch TV at the same time. The way it is set up now, the TV is on the other side of the room. I talked to the guy and got 7 meters of cable for 480 yen. Nice.

Back in Takadanobaba I climbed up the Big Box and went to the arcade. There was something that has been bothering my for a while, and I had to try it out. There are these card games at the arcade where you place different cards on a playing field, much like any other tabletop card game. The only difference is that the game registers where the cards are placed and correlates them to characters on screen. When you move the cards around, your characters on the screen move to correspond with them. There is one called Aquarian Age Alternative that is half the price of the other ones but still looks like a lot of fun. I ended up buying a starter pack and playing through the tutorial. It turns out that every time you finish playing a game, the machine spits out a new card for your collection. So not only do you get to have fun, but you get more cards for next time as well. I currently have a pretty crappy deck, but I plan on continuing to play for a period of time.

After about 6 games or so, I finally returned home. I got my TV hooked up on the other side of my room and cataloged my new games. It was a good day.