Tokyo Trip: Day 8 & 9

Tokyo trip

Sun 18.November - Thurs.29.November.2018

DAY 8 Monday, 26. November

Disneyland day! We had our alarms going off 06.30 AM and right after breakfast we headed for Tokyo Station from where there was a bit of a walk to find the right platform to get to to Maihama Station. We just followed the "Disney looking crowd", so we didn't get lost. On the train ride to Maihama, looking out the window I could see in the distance an amusement park that looked abandoned. You can't compete with Disney, I guess? This was also the only time I got a glimpse of Tokyo Skytree in the distance. From Maihama station we got on the monorail which took us closer to the Disneyland entrance. The first view of the place right after we exited the monorail was a building site, not very flattering, but it can't be helped. Since we had bought our tickets earlier, we could pretty much just walk in without waiting. We got by the ticket booths just fine, but before we reached the actual entrance, we were stopped by a staff member who handed us something. I didn't look at it that closely at the time, but later, it was just a paper with an address to a survey they wished you'd fill in (online). I did fill the survey, a few days later after we got back home.

We started going counter-clockwise through the park. There was only one ride I absolutely wanted to go to and that was the Star Tours ride in Tomorrowland. For whatever reason the ride didn't seem to be popular, there was hardly any line and the waiting time was only 5-10 minutes. I loved it! It was my favorite ride in the whole park out of the ones we went to. Outside the ride was a small Star Wars shop, I looked through it and only one pin I wanted to buy, but decided to wait until later. Next to the shop was a life size R2-D2 and BB-8 replicas displayed behind glass.

We skipped Toontown pretty much, we did kind of just walk through it. I think most of the rides were aimed at younger kids. We quickly moved on to Fantasyland, where we found more rides with reasonable waiting times. We did pick out quite "lame" rides most of the time, because the lines were shorter. I would have liked to go to either Splash or Big Thunder Mountain, but the lines were always too damn long. When it peaked, I think the Big Thunder had over two hours waiting time. I think we got more out of the day by picking places with shorter lines, rather than to wait for hours to get in one ride. Still, it's a shame, because I really like roller coasters. Of course, there are those "Fastpass" things, but we didn't use one of those at all during the day.

So, in Fantasyland we went to the It's a Small World, Castle Carousel, Alice's Tea Party  and the Haunted Mansion (the Nightmare Before Christmas themed). The teacups were the most fun, because at least they were going fast compared to the others. Haunted Mansion and It's a Small World were both pretty lame speed wise, but I liked them both visually. I liked all the colors and geometrical shapes that pretty much decorated everything inside Small World, and the Haunted Mansion nailed it with the TNBC look and feel.

chocolate churros, yummy!

We didn't stay long in Critter Country, we watched for a while people coming down the Splash mountain, but moved on to Westernland pretty soon. We went on the Mark Twain Riverboat, again, it was very slow, but the view of the park was great from the top level of the boat. When we got  back on shore, we stopped by the Cowboy Cook-house and got some smoked turkey legs for lunch. It was extremely messy to eat, but good all the same.  Food and snacks were the thing we spent the most money on in the park. The different popcorn flavours were a big thing, everywhere you looked, you could see someone carrying one of many various popcorn cases. I think there was 8 different flavours available. During the day we did try out both the caramel and barbecue flavoured popcorns. Can't complain, they were both pretty tasty!

We saw two parades during the day and both times we just happened to be there, we didn't even remember there was going to be parades. I liked the first parade we saw more than the second one, it didn't make as big of an impact and felt less grandiose. I really liked the parade music and songs, it was really upbeat. No wonder they even sold CDs  of the parade music in one of the stores.

After the first parade, we moved on to Adventureland and went on the Western River Railroad, nothing too exciting, but again, you got a good look around at the park. From there we moved to the center of the map, where the castle is. I dunno, was it called Cinderella's castle? We just admired it from the outside. Next to the castle was a Snow White's wishing well, it was a small, quiet place. A short lasted peaceful respite, so to speak.

We saw bits of the second parade, not the whole thing. While most of the people were watching the parade, we took the opportunity to order some food and get a table from one of the dining places that happened to be close to the parade route. After that, we mostly just walked around aimlessly for a while (and tried the second flavour of popcorn too), and it was starting to get dark. We were walking passed the Pirates of Caribbean ride and saw that there was only 5 minutes waiting time. Unfortunately, I think there was something wrong with the ride. I don't think the boats are supposed to be back to back so close to each other and the animatronics were out of sync. There was no announcement if there  was something wrong, so I'm only guessing. If it was functioning properly, then it was the most disappointing ride of the day! While we were not having fun on the Pirates boat ride, we missed the fireworks show, we only saw the sparkles from the last boom. There was going to be more fireworks few hours later, but we weren't really planning to wait around just to see them.

The last place we hadn't been to yet was the World Bazaar area. It was mostly shops and some restaurants. I didn't find anything at the shops to buy, but their window displays were really nice. Actually, the whole park looked very beautiful with all the lights on, the bazaar area particularly, had a very impressive Christmas vibe.

For our last ride, we went to the Star Tours again, there was no line to speak of. This time it was a slightly different scenario in the "story" of the ride. Maybe I should have only gone on this ride over and over again for the whole day just to see all the variations. That would have been fun! After that, we still went and ordered some calzones from the Pan Galactic Pizza Port right across from the Star Tours. I wish I had ordered a drink, because the calzone was so damn hot that I burned my tongue.  Probably spent the next fifteen minutes just waiting for it to cool off, so that it would be safe to take a bite. The last thing I did before we left the park was going to that small Star Wars shop to buy  the SW pin I was looking at earlier. I'm still amazed that it was the only thing I bought from the whole park (food doesn't count!)

Back at Maihama station, we were walking past a café, and then I had to lay my eyes on the poster advertising them selling croissants filled with soft ice cream. It looked soo good! I had to get one! (I can't believe how much I ate the whole day...)

When we got back to Kanda Station, and were heading for our hotel, we suddenly heard the guys walking behind us speak Finnish! Didn't expect to  hear that. Small world, huh?


DAY 9 Tuesday, 27. November

We went back to Nakano Broadway, where I roamed through the rest of of floor 3 and 2 that I didn't check out previously when we were here. I bought a lot of small figures from 4 different shops, most of the figures were DBZ, but a few non-Dragon ball slipped in too.

Here, in Nakano Broadway, you could easily notice the difference between cashiers. Pretty much everywhere else we'd been the clerks working the cash register had always been over friendly. But here, in some stores, you could definitely see that they couldn't care less. Not that they were unfriendly, they were professional, but it was such a stark contrast.

I happened to find a room filled with Gachapon machines. I can say that, this was the one of the few places where they had some Gachas I haven't seen anywhere else. There were these freaking adorable hedgehog figures, and I wanted a particular one, but I kept having bad luck (again). I kept spinning the damn thing until I finally got the one I wanted the most,  by then I ran out of coins and didn't bother to change one of my bills for more.

Aside from having a different figure selection, this place also had a few machines labeled R-18. I'm just assuming because I didn't check, what you get from those capsules where photos/prints of girls "with their naughty parts showing". I think I also saw a machine that gave out panties.... This was the only place I saw Gachapons like these, so it was a bit odd to suddenly see stuff like that out of nowhere mixed in with regular Gachapons. While I was there, a group of friends, both guys and girls came in and one of the guys gave one of those machines a spin while his friends eagerly chatted beside him. None of my business, but that was a  little unexpected. Anyway....

When we were finished at the mall, rather than getting back to the hotel right away, we did explore the area a little around the mall. Pretty much next to the mall entrance was a pet shop with puppies and kittens in the window display. It wasn't anything like the pet shops in Finland. This was more like a puppies with accessories shop and a few kittens sprinkled here and there. Having all those cute puppies on display like that seems like a prime way of getting people to buy one on impulse. It makes me sad to think about what may happen to some of the puppies. Even if I don't understand how this system works, I see a lot of potential ways things could go wrong for those poor animals. You can only hope they all go to good homes.

A little bit further from the mall, we walked past a pachinko parlour (those places are noisy as hell, you can't help but to notice them) and I happened to find on the ground a metal ball that I think is from one of those pachinko machines. Nothing really special about it, it's just a tiny steel ball, but still kinda fun to see one up close. I would never go to a pachinko parlour myself, the noise drives me crazy just from the outside. I can't understand how people sitting inside cope with it.

random photo from Nakano

Opposite side from the pachinko place was a supermarket, It was the biggest we've seen so far, three floors. The ground and basement level had all the foods while the third floor had clothes and other everyday stuff. The ground floor even had a bakery, fresh loaves of bread and they even made pizza! This was definitely the best food store we found besides the one in Okachimachi. Shame that we didn't find this place the first time we were here!  The store's name was Life or 4 Life, I can't remember exactly. Aside from the usual stuff we bought at the food department I also found on clearance some Pokeballs that come with candy and a small random  figure. I waited until we got back to the hotel before I opened them, I got Meowth and Eevee!

This was our last night in Kanda, tomorrow we would be transferring to an airport hotel.


to be continued....

Tokyo Trip: Day 2 & 3

Tokyo trip

Sun. 18.November - Thurs. 29.November.2018

DAY 2 Tuesday, 20. November

Note: I regret not taking more photos inside all the various stores we visited, but most of them had a no photographs policy anyway, so I did try to respect that.

I woke up around 07 in the morning, but rather than getting up right away, I turned on the TV to see if there was anything interesting on. They were still talking about the Nissan guy on most channels, but on one channel there was this program about a cat. I remember seeing this type of thing mentioned in a documentary years before, how some smaller, countryside train stations have cats as mascots for the station. Or if I remember it correctly, the cat actually has the title "station master" or something like that. The cat was wearing a cute, tiny conductor's cap! They followed the cat around and just filming the cat's daily life. When it was out on a walk, while it was being groomed, etc. I was quite nice and relaxing program to start your day with.

Yesterday, while we were at the convenience store, we forgot to buy anything to eat for breakfast since we were too tired to think ahead. So instead of going to the store again, we headed down to the teeny, tiny diner in the hotel lobby. I think they only had seating for max twenty people there, if the place had been full. The place was never full while we were there, but the staff would still ask people to wait outside until a table cleared. I guess maybe they don't like seat people at the same table with strangers. You can't help but to notice how the Japanese people eat their food and then leave and don't stay to hang around, or at least the Salarymans don't. The diner's clientele seemed mostly to consist of them.

The breakfast was a mix of Japanese and western food, or you were of course free to pick whatever you wanted, since it was a buffet. They had french toast, bacon, scrambled egg, fresh salad and fruits, and also miso soup, rice, different sorts of fish, beans and more I'm forgetting. This was the first time I tasted miso soup, I was unsure if I liked it or not, but once I got used to the taste, now I really like it! Also a very noticeable difference comparing this hotel breakfast to any Finnish hotel breakfast was the "portion" sizes. Everything was so tiny! For example, in the poster you can see that banana, cut to size and I suppose you were only allowed to take a few pieces, in a Finnish hotel you get to take the whole banana...

After breakfast and a quick detour through our room to get our stuff, we started walking to the train station from where we traveled to Okachimachi station. There were three stores in this area I wanted to visit. Now with the pocket WiFi it was easy-peasy to find our way around!

First place we visited was called Daiso, a 100 yen shop, where everything (unless priced otherwise) was only a hundred yen! They had a little bit of everything , but mostly kitchen and office stuff. This Daiso was a smaller one, later during the week when my Mom visited another Daiso on her own,  she told me it was far bigger, on two floors! This Daiso shared the space on the top floor of the building with a candy shop and a cafe. Mom really loved Daiso and other 100 Yen shops, I really liked them too, but I mostly just browsed and didn't buy much. The only two things I bought from this Daiso was a Gudetama themed spoon and a protecting sleeve for my Pasmo card.

On our way out, I also went inside the candy shop, I think it was called Golden Store. I didn't buy much from there either, mostly because I knew the next two places we were heading for, would put a dent in my wallet. I bought a small bag of of rose flavored candy, a One Piece chocolate egg and, out of curiosity,  some apple jello. We headed downstairs and exited the building. Before we continued our way, I popped open that apple jello and ate it. I read somewhere that the Japanese consider it to be rude if you're walking and eating at the same time, so that's why I took the chance to eat it now while there was also a trash can nearby. What they say about how hard it is to find a trash bin in Japan also turned out to be true. Jello seemed to be a popular dessert, in every food store we went to you were always able to find some sort of jello. While in Finland it is very rare to find any kind of ready made jello. The apple jello I had was okayish, not terrible, but neither that good that I would like to have another one. Before we continued on our way, we got curious what was in the basement level of the building, since there was such a traffic of people coming and going from there. So we went downstairs to have a look. It was a supermarket! We took a look around the place and they had so many things we wanted to try out. We decided to come back later to buy our evening meals here, once we were ready to head back to the hotel. This store became our favorite place in regards to buying food, no other store we visited could match it.

Our next destination was a shop called Hobby off, where they sell used goods, specifically toys and figures. I bought 24 things in total! Dragon Ball Z, Moomin, Godzilla, Dragon Quest, the Lion King and Pokémon! 24 may sound a lot, but most of them are tiny figures that are the size which fit inside a capsule of a Gachapon machine. The majority of them also cost less than 500 yen. I did make one big purchase in this store, that cost me 2160 yen. I found a big statue of the classic Sonic the Hedgehog (maybe 25 cm in height, not that huge actually), complete in box. This was November, with Christmas around the corner. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to get it. Not for myself, though. My friend is a Sonic fan, and I knew that I wanted to find some Sonic stuff for him as a Christmas gift. I had imagined it would be easy to find as much Sonic merchandise I could carry, but strangely enough, it was very hard to come by. Later, during our stay, I saw this exact same statue twice (for a higher price, without the original box). So, this Sonic statue was size-wise my biggest purchase, but I did find something more expensive later on...

The next place we were heading for was Yamashiroya toy store further down the street. While we were walking there, we took a small detour and went to look inside one of those Sega game centers that are everywhere. Aside from the arcade games and claw machines there was also a small selection of Gachapon machines. I bought my first gacha here, which was a cute, miniature Japanese school backpack or a randoseru as they are apparently called. I didn't get the color I wanted, but I was happy with it none the less.

Now at Yamashiroya toy store. Outside the store, they had a big selection of Gachapon machines. Here, I bought my second gacha from a machine with eeveelutions, I got Sylveon!

Also outside, there were these quite famous vending machines decorated with Marvel characters. I was slightly disappointed there wasn't Marvel themed drinks, there were only regular drinks you could find in any other vending machine.

Inside, Yamashiroya is seven floors packed with goodies. The spaces left for  people to move around are very narrow so you have to be careful not to bump into anything or anyone. The whole store is also extremely loud. Imagine, they are playing music really loud and on top of that, playing commercials even louder and on top of that  imagine every toy that is capable of producing any kind of sound is turned on. You almost wish you'd brought earplugs.

The top floor was dedicated to Kirby stuff. I'm not sure, but I got the impression this was only temporary, maybe they change this floor every month with a different theme. Something about this floor didn't seem as finished as the rest of the floors, as it wasn't even as fully packed as the rest. I don't really remember the layouts for the rest of the floors that well, one or two were dedicated to Gundam and other building stuff and there was also a floor for western pop culture stuff like Harry Potter, Marvel, Star Wars and so forth.

Oh, I didn't leave empty handed from here either. I bought 16 things from here in total, most of it was Pokémon, but also some Moomin and DBZ. This store was also the first one to ask me, if I wanted my purchases tax free or not. I should just have said no to avoid the wait and hassle while the clerk stamps the receipts to my passport. Even my mom didn't leave empty handed, but she settled with a Godzilla sticker.

Before we rounded back to the supermarket, we again took a detour through a Sega game station, but this time I tried my luck with a claw machine. Might have been some sort of kiddy version because it was so small, though. I had no luck with the first machine I tried, but I switched to a second one and I actually won, barely! The claw wasn't quite on top of the hole, when the item fell down, but it bounced off the wall and fell right in the hole and I got it! The prize was a small, cute little balancing penguin holding up a heart sign. I translated the sign later and I believe it says "Thank you". I also tried to look up what the penguin character is called and the conclusion I got is that it's called Rurutea (Lulutea?) or something like that.

We got us some food from the supermarket and took the train back to our hotel. Back in our room, I couldn't wait to try out some of the stuff I bought today.

First, the stuff from the candy store:

Rose candy. The candies are very soft and chewy. I was a little sceptical about the rose flavor, they smell like perfume, but the taste is really sweet! A small bag of these cost only 105 yen (about 0,85€?). I would buy these again!

One Piece chocolate egg. It looks like Kinder chocolate, but the taste  is far from it. Very "floury"  feel to it, i.e. very cheap, bad tasting chocolate. The surprise gift was a miniature bust of a One Piece character, out of the 16 characters to collect, I got Mihawk. Cost 213 yen, not that expensive, but the chocolate isn't worth it. And the mini character busts were relatively easy to find in any store that sold used figures.

From Yamashiroya toy store:

Dragon Ball Super snack pot and choco filled waffle. The  waffle wasn't nothing special, not bad, but not really good either, just okay. I got a Son Goku sticker with it, the very same picture that is on the waffle's wrapping. I don't like how super deformed they made the characters, they're not chibiesque enough to be cute!

DBS snacks, or chips, whatever you want to call them. I can't specify what flavour they were supposed to be, but they smelled like a cup of noodles. Maybe they were just some regular non-spicy "grill" flavor. And the surprise gift I got was a cardboard coin with a picture of Trunks and on the flip side there was some sort of code, that, I'm guessing is for some sort of campaign or a mobile game maybe? The snacks were pretty good, but the portion size is laughably small, or I'm too used to the mega size bag of chips we have in Finland.

Lastly, bought from the supermarket, a strawberry daifukumochi. Texture wise, this isn't like anything I've ever eaten before. The pink "frosting" is very springy, or what's the word, elastic? Even a knife didn't cut through it very easily. The filling was sweet red bean paste, but honestly, I thought it didn't taste like anything, not sweet nor salty. All the sweetness I could taste came from the half raw strawberry in the middle. It took a while to get used to eating mochi, but now I kind of like it. As far as the flavors go,  I think they are kind of bland, but I relly like the texture when you bite into one. Now I also understand why so many people nearly choke to death while eating these if you're not careful.

Around 10 PM I was channel surfing the TV. They were still talking about the damn Nissan guy on most channels, but I was happy to find a channel that was showing good old Dragon Ball Z!And after DBZ ended, they showed a Gundam anime (not sure which one of them) followed by an episode of Tokyo Ghoul. To my disappointment, Tuesday evening's were pretty much the only time I saw anime on the TV.

a weird Dragon Ball commercial

DAY 3 Wednesday, 21. November

Our main goal for the day was getting to the Shibuya Disney store to buy our tickets to Tokyo Disneyland. Shibuya was pretty much on the other side of the map from our hotel location, so it took a 30 minute train ride to get there. Again, we messed up with picking the right exit, but now with Google Maps to help us, it didn't feel as such a big deal. We deliberately arrived in Shibuya a little early, before the Disney store even opened because while we were here, we also wanted to have a look at the famous Hachiko statue. Somehow, we managed to avoid the "Hachiko exit" which would have taken us directly to the statue from the station, we picked some other exit and wound up taking a longer route there.

But it was alright, while walking the street heading for the also famous Shibuya crossing I came across these Pikachu decorated vending machines! Unlike the Marvel one, these ones actually had Pikachu decorated bottles in it! I didn't know if the bottles contained juice or soda, but I bought one anyway. I was surprised/disappointed that instead of a Pikachu bottle I got a Psyduck one! The drink turned out to be mixed fruit/vegetable juice, which wasn't really to my liking to be honest.

The closer we got to Shibuya crossing the more people seemed to swarm out of nowhere. This was the first time since we came to Tokyo that I really noticed how many people there are. You don't really notice the amount of people when they are spread out, but waiting at the traffic light creates this bottle neck effect and all of a sudden you are surrounded by a massive wall of people. And when the lights finally turn green, the flock moves like a tidal wave across the street and then people start to spread out again. And speaking of a flock of people, the Hachiko statue was also swarmed by a crowd.

People were being surprisingly polite, letting others taking their turns standing next to the statue to take photos. In my pictures of the statue, there seem to be very few people around , but I promise you that was not the case. People were also very generous in that regard that they let the folks who just wanted a picture of the statue take their time to do so. Nearby to the statue was also this beautiful mural I have rarely seen mentioned anywhere. Only here in Shibuya did we see these big posters advertising a big international horse galloping race that was about to happen the following weekend. We did actually consider going, because we've never seen a proper gallop race before (we don't have those in Finland), but realizing how it would mess up all other things we had planned, we decided best not to go.

After seeing Hachiko we started heading in the direction of the Disney store. On our way there, we also dropped in a store called Village Vanguard. I knew they were supposed to have a small selection of Moomin stuff I was interested in seeing. In regards of their Moomin stuff, I held on to my money, I didn't really find anything I liked or the ones I liked were too expensive/big. They also had a lot of Disney and other western pop culture stuff (Simpsons, Gremlins, etc.). I really wanted to buy an art book of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Quest illustrations, but the book was so big and heavy and I didn't want to carry it around with me for the rest of the day. I considered coming back for it later during the day, but ultimately didn't because I also considered how much weight it would add to my luggage at the end of our trip. I didn't leave empty handed though, my mom really wanted a "Maneki Neko" (the lucky cat waving its paw) for herself, so I bought one for her and for myself, I bought a Kingdom Hearts "sea salt ice cream" thingy and also a cool looking Amaterasu sticker from the game Ôkami.

Village Vanguard entrance

We were finally at the Disney store! Out of all the Disney store's I've visited this one was definitely the nicest looking and least crammed. There was actually room to move around! All of the rooms were nicely decorated and almost in every room they had these cute statues of various Disney characters. Since this was November, there were already a lot of Christmas themed stuff for sale, mainly those tree ornaments. We had a look around the whole store before getting in line on the third floor for our Disneyland tickets. The ticket counter was the busiest place in the store, but it was also very efficient, I didn't have to wait for long for my turn. Once I got our tickets, we still wandered the store for a while, but aside for the tickets I didn't buy anything else. I was hoping they'd had some Star Wars stuff for sale, but it was non existent. That was a little disappointing,  but their Marvel selection was also small, so I guess they are more into the classic animated Disney than the newer stuff.

The next place we visited was this multi story Tokyu Hands store. I was looking for a specific thing and unfortunately I couldn't find it. But! I didn't leave empty handed! On the top floor where they had the Gundam/other miniature building section I found some Star Wars lightsaber chopsticks! I bought the Darth Maul variation, of course. This was also the first place where I was confused over the tax stuff. The price tag on the chopsticks said a 1000 yen, but at the register the price was actually 1290 yen. The clerk was very apologetic when he asked me for the missing 290 yen when I had just handed him a 1000 yen bill  and I thought I was done. After that, I tried better to keep in mind the tax addition to save me and the person at the register further embarrassment in the following stores I shopped at.

We were getting tired and didn't explore Tokyu Hands fully, but a fun thing I noticed was that in the staircases between the floors they had hung up on the walls these manga spreads of Naruto and Bleach. Not sure why they were there, but it was cool to see them none the less.

After exiting Tokyu Hands we walked down the street looking for a convenience store to buy some lunch. We came across this building site with a wall around it. The wall was covered with panels from the Akira manga. Most of the panels pictured explosions and ruins, so fitting, I guess? We found us a convenience store and took a lunch break. While taking a break, I came to think of how much more street art I've been seeing here in Shibuya than the other places we've been so far. The graffiti I took a picture of was in an alley across the street from the konbini.

official art vs. street art

The next place I wanted to go was Shibuya Mandarake store. While searching for the place, we came across a Can★Do, which is another 100-yen shop, and my mom really wanted to go in and have a look. I didn't find anything special in here, I came close to buying some really cute sticker sheets, but decided not to, since I suspected I was going to spend a whole lot at Mandarake. The only thing I left with was some Gegege no Kitaro noodles I was going to eat once we retired to our hotel for the evening.

Engrish at Can★Do

We finally got to Mandarake, which was on the basement level and smelled like one too (seriously, the place really had a funky smell to it). I first had a look at their figure section, and while I was there I overheard a couple speaking Swedish. I wanted to say something to them, like "nice, to hear someone speaking Swedish for a change", but I didn't because I thought they might think of me as some eavesdropping weirdo. Understanding what people are saying is a thing you don't realize you'll miss. Hearing a language you recognize, always creates this happy moment like, "hey, I understood that!" when you otherwise feel like you're in a bubble of your own because you can't understand  what's being said around you. Between some shelves, I found a couple of boxes of plushies, I dug around them and found a really cute Mew and a Jolteon plush. I considered buying them both, but ultimately I chose Jolteon over Mew because it was still in a sealed bag with its original tag. I took a look at the trading card section and drooled over one cabinet with Dragon Ball Heroes cards, but some of those cards were way too expensive. Some part of my brain keeps telling me I can't spend the equality of 50€ on one single card, no matter how rare it is. I really wanted that Kuriza card, but it was not meant to be.

This is where the fun begins! I moved over to the doujinshi (for women) section of the store. Since I can't read Japanese I had a real hard time finding what I was looking for. I don't think the series were categorized in alphabetic order, maybe by popularity or by their publisher (like Shonen Jump-series being its own category maybe?). I was looking for DBZ doujinshi's but couldn't find them directly, I wasn't looking for Naruto doujin's but it had so many shelves reserved for it, it was always easy to find. And once I found Naruto, from there I found the shelf with Death Note doujinshis and while I was browsing them I recognized Vegeta's spiky hair and pink shirt on one of the spines of the comic books and discovered the Dragon Ball  section all on my own! I cherry picked out the comics that had nice looking covers and /or character that I like, because that is pretty much the only thing you can do since you aren't allowed to open the plastic pockets and look inside what the comics are actually about. The only indicators you can base your judgement on is the cover and the price of the Doujin (and if there is an R18 label, but that wasn't always that noticeable). The covers can be very misleading most of the time. About the price, I have read that if the price is high on the comic it is either because the artist is very popular or because it's porn, "the higher the price, the dirtier it is" or something like that. So, I tried to stick within the low and middle price range to avoid the dirtier stuff (and now in retrospect, I can say this strategy worked, mostly, except when I deliberately made a few exceptions). After Dragon Ball I tried to look for Star Wars, but I pretty soon gave up on that and asked the clerk where I could find it. And by "ask" I mean I pointed at the written down question I had in my notebook and showed them a picture of Star Wars. It worked! They showed me where I could find them! The selection was considerably smaller than the others I had looked at, but still it was there!  I left Mandarake without any figures, but I found for myself a cute Jolteon plush and four doujinshi of both Star Wars and Dragonball Z and two Death Note ones.

It was getting late so, we started heading back to the station, but once again, on our way there, we took a detour through a Sega game center.I tried one of those bigger claw machines a couple of times and tried to win a Dragon Ball GT figure, but with no success. This place also had Gachapon machines outside, I got two different cat hats for the shits and giggles, one in the shape of a candy wrapper and the other one was a pear. I'm sure our cat will hate them.

We took the train back to Kanda, but instead of going directly to the hotel, we looked up on Google a food store nearby that was slightly bigger than a standard convenience store. They had a little bit better selection of items, but still nothing compared to the great store we visited in Okachimachi.

Back at the hotel, and after our evening dinner, I opened the doujins I bought today and had a look at what I got. I was successful at picking out pretty harmless ones, some of them were confusing more than anything, but still had nice art styles. Out of the 10 that I bought, I'd say only one of them was a dud. It was a Star Wars one, the cover looked nice and all, but the art style on the inside didn't really appeal to me, and since I can't read Japanese, so based on the visual storytelling alone, I got very little out of it. It was fun opening these, because they are like blind bags, you don't know what you're getting.

Shibuya in the evening

to be continued....