myOtaku.com: satan665

myO Still <3's You

Vitals

Birthday
• 1980-10-31
Gender
• Male
Location
• Oregon
Member Since
• 2003-08-04
Occupation
• grad student
Real Name
• Andy

Personal

Achievements
• MS degree in Organic Chemistry
Anime Fan Since
• 1999
Favorite Anime
• Cowboy bebop, Haibane Renmei, Samurai Champloo, Gundam Seed, Inuyasha
Goals
• PhD in chemistry
Hobbies
• comics, videogames, guitar, toys, transformers
Talents
• slacking

myOtaku.com: satan665

Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Yeah...so I'm slow
Well it takes me a while to get moving, but I've found myself with some good free-time. 14 days in Japan was spent primarily in Tokyo. I'll talk about the first part of the trip.

The plane ride was horrifically boring. There's a 16 hour difference from where I live so I essentially missed a day (came back to haunt me later). 10 hours on a plane I wish on nobody. They forgot our vegetarian meal so they had to whip up a conglomerate of the side dishes from standard and first class. (it was actually really good). Anyway we arrived in Narita airport and went through customs, got our bags and whatnot and the first impression was interesting. There were a lot of Japanese men doing work at the airport in funny suits and helmets, which I wish I had a picture of. The airport was like any other airport, and we got on the express bullet train to Tokyo.

It was pretty easy to do, and as I would find out there are english signs for almost all of the train stations which made getting around pretty easy.

Our first 6 nights were in the Sakura Hotel, which is hot pink outside. Our room was half the size of a dorm room. It was nice though, and the staff spoke english.

The fun really started when we wandered sround the city. Its 99.5% Japanese people and we almost never saw tourists except at the really popular tourist places which we didn't see much of. The big shopping districts are packed with people once things open up, and there are always kids handing out fliers and advertisements for something or other. I got some great Transformers toys from toy stores in Akihabara, and one of the most fun things I found to buy was little figures. You can get them from capsule machines, but also different ones sold in little boxes where you don't know what you're getting til you open it. I spend some good $$ trying to collect all of the individual Naruto and Final Fantasy figures, but it was a lot of fun.

Along the same theme was the Bandai museum, which was especially cool because of the Gundam exhibit which is 3 or so floors of big models and TV screen showing super-detailed info on how they "work". They have 2 lifesize gundam heads which are great photo-ops and some cool scenes set up with tons of action figures in a huge battle.

(more later...cultural stuff)
Comments (1)

« Home

Anime | How to Draw Anime | Anime Wallpapers

Top of Page