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Plans are for Losers
I put this trip together over roughly two days. My father is a retired
employee of an airline, and thus all of the unnecessary traveling I do
is standby. No point in booking standby ahead of time, so I found a
flight that left on the Wednesday of the convention and booked it that
Monday, hoping to get there on Thursday, giving me a day and a half to
poke around and do whatever.
That didn't work out, however. It turned out that I had some sort of
quiz in Japanese class on that Wednesday, so I pushed it back to the
riskier day of Thursday. Think about it, for a moment. I told my
teacher ahead of time that I'd probably miss a class due to this trip,
but apparently going to Japan isn’t a good enough excuse to miss a
quiz in Japanese class…
Regardless, I booked a hotel, put random clothes in a bag, and set off
to the exciting journey that is sitting for 20 or more hours at a time
(not including short walks from one gate to another).
Look to the Sky
I decided to try and get a first class seat on this trip, since I'd
never done it before. The trip was about eleven hours, and in first
class they fill what seems like four of those hours with food. While I
found all the food to be good, but terribly excessive, I did enjoy the
leg room, which was *almost* enough for me to stretch myself out. I'm
6'5" (take note that I'm freaking tall, as that will be important
later) and the seats were designed for someone 6'4". Just my luck.
Also, if you've ever been on an airplane that had a pseudo-radio, you
can feel my pain. Each of the 14 stations (only 11 of which had music)
had two to four good songs per two hours of running time. Yeah, it
rocks.
Beyond the Sea
Upon landing, I found that my watch had stopped and my cell phone
had died, destroying any hope of me knowing what time it was when I
really wanted to know. Fortunately, there was a terribly large clock
near the bus stop, and I paced for about thirty minutes.
The hotel I stayed at was the Mercure of Narita, a rather nice hotel
with slightly larger rooms than I was accustomed to (ignoring the
double-room fluke from the last trip here). I checked in, checked my
email, and decided to drop by one of my favorite places in Japan,
Akihabara.
Electric Avenue
If you're into video games, anime/manga, or computers, you owe it to
yourself to drop by Akihabara if you ever go to Japan. This place is
full of all that kind of stuff. Particularly amusing are the people
selling computer components on the street.
Seeing how this is the "Electric City", I hunted down a store that was
selling watches in hopes of getting a battery. The man there told me
that it would take 10 days to send my watch off to get a battery,
which was an amount of time I clearly didn't have. Oddly enough,
though, my watch began to work again immediately as he said that, so
I'm guessing he had the magical ability to intimidate electronic
devices. I thanked him and moved along.
The stores here have changed quite a bit since last time I was here.
The Aso Bit City moved to a much smaller location (apparently replaced
by what's probably the largest pornography outlet I’ve ever seen,
though being the good ambassador that I am, I chose not to go inside),
and one of the Gamers stores closed down, though the largest one
remained, still sporting the life threatening hand rail-less stairs
that fill me with fear each time I walk up and down them.
After wandering around for hours, buying a few comics that were
requested by my friends, I made my way back to Narita, checked my
email again, and proceeded to fall asleep at a normal hour (roughly
10:30), which is something I’m somehow incapable of here in the US.
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