Changing Hotels

I won't keep you in suspense any longer. We did manage to find a bed every night of our Tokyo adventure. Our next three nights were spent at a hotel just south of one of the well established nightlife districts: Shibuya.

Before we headed to our new hotel, we decided to head south of Ueno and explore one of the best known districts to Americans: Akihabara. This neighborhood is famous for all things geeky and nerdy. It is the home of electronics mega stores, parts stores with every electronic bit you could hope for, comic book (manga) stores, and comic book figurine stores. Akihabara also has a reputation for people dressed in outlandish costumes, "maid cafes" or cafes where the hostesses dress up in frilly maid costumes, etc.

Unfortunately, we chose early Monday morning to drop by. I imagine that this is probably the tamest time you an imagine for this district. We just didn't think it through. Nothing opened until 11am, so we spent about an hour getting our bearings and eating donuts. At 11, we started browsing shops. Russell had spotted a used Mac store, so we started there. It was three floors of tightly packed Mac stuff. The first floor was ipods and iphones, the next floor was laptops and the top floor was desktops and displays. The prices were excellent, they had a good selection of older models and brand new models. It was actually quite impressive. I took a picture of one corner. My apologies to the poor guy in the shot.

We also found a nice selection of oscilloscopes at another store and store after store after store of plastic manga and anime figurines. We tried to find a board game store (it seemed like a good place to look) but we never located one. That is to say, we located a store that sells board games, but it had four or five branches of all sorts of games, hobbies, figurines, etc. and we weren't able to figure out which one had the games in it.

As for gawking at local geeks (something everyone had recommended) - we really didn't see too much out of the ordinary. There were a bunch of young tourists and guys in business suits, but that was about it for people watching. Again. Early monday morning.

After Akihabara, we continued south to the Ginza district. This district is famous for quite the opposite clientele. Namely, the wealthy elite. This is the place to find streets and streets lined with top end designer names and people out doing some serious shopping (or tourists doing some serious window gazing). The costumes changed from jeans and t-shirts to pumps and furs. We had found a recommended restaurant in our guidebook that featured Omurice. That's the chicken fried rice seasoned with catsup and covered in a thin egg omelet. I have often heard omurice referred to as Japanese comfort food and it is a lunch-time standard at many restaurants - usually for $5-$10. We love omurice, so recommended omurice drew us right in. We headed for the 5th floor of the Shiseido building.

As you can probably guess, this was no ordinary omurice restaurant. First, we were not allowed to operate the elevator ourselves, but were escorted by be-gloved hostesses. When we arrived we had to wait for about 15 minutes before having our coats checked and being escorted to a table set with fine china and silver. Our waiter was wearing tails. Seriously. A bottle of water cost $6 and a (small) bottle of Perrier cost $8. I know, because they were the cheapest drinks on the menu and so that's what Russell and I ordered. When we were given the real menu, we quickly searched out omurice and found it to also be the cheapest dish on the menu - at $30. This is for something flavored with catsup. It was gorgeously presented, with the egg perfectly even and tucked in on the edges, but the taste was far inferior to the omurice we get down the street from our apartment. The sauce poured over the top could have come straight from Chef Boyardee. I was disappointed.

Conclusion: This appeared to be the kind of restaurant where very wealthy grandmother's take their picky grandchildren. We could come to no other conclusion. Oh, and misguided tourists. They clearly get those too.

It was quite an experience. We did share the elevator down with a group of elderly ladies who were absolutely taken with Russell. Once they realized he spoke Japanese the whole elevator erupted with giggling.

Bellies full and wallets lighter, we headed to our new hotel. Russell had managed to find it on the internet (not so hard, as it turns out) and had called to make sure the reservations had actually gone through. The new hotel was more what you would expect from a Western style hotel, but it also doubled as a spa during the day - which meant we had access to the fancy public bath downstairs. There was also a nice breakfast spread every morning - and for a reasonable price. We were very pleased and starting to feel much more relaxed about our Tokyo adventure.