On Saturday morning, I had planned for us to wake up super early and go to the Tsukiji fish market in time to see the end of the morning Tuna auction. But Tim had other plans...sleeping in. Poor guy was still sick, so we got quite a late start. The second plan was to tour the Imperial Gardens then head over to Akihabara for some electronics overload. When we finally got out of the hotel around 11:30, we found out it was raining. Not just raining, but raining and snowing. This is not, in my opinion, the best weather to tour gardens in, so we scrapped that plan and went straight to Akihabara.
If you don't know, Akihabara is the electronics super-center of Tokyo. You can literally find any thing electronics related in these few square blocks. Tim was, of course, mesmerized.
Unfortunately, we didn't take a lot of pictures here. Ok, that's a lie, we took a TON of pictures inside the stores with the display cameras! :-) But somehow I didn't think they would appreciate it if I put my SD card in the camera and actually saved those! (Can you tell I thought about doing that!?)
In North America, the Olympic Opening Ceremonies were in full swing around the time we arrived. How did we know that, you ask? We watched the whole thing standing in front of a 60" LED TV. We spent a long time on the TV floor of that store!
We ended up spending the whole day in Akihabara and had lunch in one of the side street cafes. Here is a picture of the area at night, lit up by neon...
And Tim thought the street tiles were very fitting. I believe this is some sort of radio/boombox, but every 5 feet or so, there was a different tile, featuring a different electronic. They take their sidewalk decorations very seriously here, I could probably do a whole post on them!
When we got back to the hotel it was about 7:00, so we headed back to the department stores to purchase our Valentine's Day presents for each other. I had found mine the day before, but Tim hadn't found anything he wanted. When we got to the stores, we realized they closed at 8:00, giving us 1 hour to find everything! We figured out that we went to the wrong store and ended up walking briskly down the street to find the right place. I ended up with...
A Burberry wallet! I keep getting denied by the train wickets because they have a hard time reading my Passmo card through my passport wallet, so Tim thought this would be the perfect solution! And it is! I LOVE IT!
Tim didn't find anything he really loved, so I still owe him a Valentine's present. It was kind of amazing how restrained he was in Akihabara too...I kept glancing over to see him eyeing the wire spools and crazy computer gadgets, so maybe we'll go back and he'll get something there. Oh and he just informed me there's an entire store dedicated to Robotics supplies, yeah, I'm sure he'll find something there!
That evening we closed down the stores and then tried to find somewhere to eat dinner. Our lunch had been pretty late and very filling, so we weren't particularly hungry. This was really good because everything was closed. No joke. At 7:30, the streets were packed and by 9:00, we had the sidewalks to ourselves. After going into a few restaurants and being told they were closed, we headed to an AM/PM and got Japanese convenience food and went back to our room. We ended up watching the end of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies and going to bed.
On Valentine's Day, we had brunch at the military hotel in Tokyo. This has been recommended to us a bunch of times, and now I know why...it was amazingly delicious and never ending! I was stuffed until dinner. By the time we were done with brunch, I wasn't feeling too hot and Tim was still feeling sick, so we headed back to Yokosuka.
We got "displaced" in the business district finding our way to the JR train station, where we could catch the right train back home, but we did find a little park.
We ended up finishing our Valentine's day with a long afternoon nap, our traditional heart-shaped pizza (no Papa Murphy's here, but Tim did a excellent job making it from "scratch") and a movie.
I hope everyone else had a wonderful Valentine's! I look forward to hearing all about them! :-)
0 comments:
Post a Comment