Hey all! Ed here! Sorry for the late update but we've been getting back to the hotel really late and just too tired to post much. So here it is at 12:22am Saturday morning....Fawn's asleep behind me and I'm doing a recap of the passed two days. On Thursday, we went to Shibuya. It's a crazy mecca of Times Square like buildings and shopping. The shopping stores are so catered to a specific, that one we went in actually only had female restrooms. Fawn found her boots. She is happy now. She also started her sock collection. We wandered and wandered until we found Mandarake, an awesome japan toy/manga/game store.
By the way, Blogger.com blows for uploading so I'm consolidating pics for now. Maybe we'll try movies again later.
Anyways, Shibuya wore us out on the ol' shopping in the city vibe so we retired to the hotel early to see what was nearby. We kept seeing all these adds for "Aqua Stadium" and decided to see what that was all about.
It's literally connected to our hotel.....as it is we have a bowling alley, arcade, food court, shopping mall, and movie theater in the hotel. Anyway, Aqua Stadium is an amusement park we found out. The Aquarium is on par with Marine World, complete with Dolphin arena, and a sea lion room. We saw penguins, fish for days, there's a shark underwater tube walkthrough and a carousel up front. There's a full size pirate ship that sways both ways like "The Revolution" from "Great America". It's big!! Then there's the virtual ride 3d movie simulator....we watched it. It was a crappy 1990's Computer Graphics version of the Alice and Wonderland....just plain weird. The highlight of Aqua Stadium was the full on "Space Mountain" type rollercoaster that loop d loops and is themed after the anime: "Galaxy express 999". You go inside space stations and corridors that rival Disneyland's "Star Tours" and check out glass exhibits of the various characters of "GE999" Very "Star Trek Experience at Las Vegas". Then japanese people guide you into another space room and two android animatronic conductors talk to you in japanese. Then you enter another room and watch an 8-10 minute Computer Graphics ride simulator/theater short of Galaxy Express 999 (Rather good and fairly recent level of quality graphics.) We did'nt know anything about GE999 but are fans now. Then the short ends and you walk into what looks like a train station but has moving seats ala rollercoaster style. There's lights everywhere and the floors are lithographs of futuristic cityscapes. You get in the rollercoaster and go on a pretty decent "Space mountain" ripoff.... Space Mountain's still better but the presentation before the ride is still great for what it actually is. So Fawn noticed they used dangling christmas lights in the coaster part but otherwise it was pretty cool for being essentially in our hotel.....So that was Thursday.
Okay, Friday... I'm getting tired so I'll just touch the key points. Nakano. We went there to see the shopping district that is setup like an inside outdoor market. See bottom left pic. It's called Sun Plaza. We shopped there. Fawn bought some dresses, more socks, and a backpack. Then we went to Nakano Broadway, which is five stories of consignment toys, figures, games, manga, etc. It took us til' about 3pm to get through it all. We got there about 11am. We had lunch at a semi traditional japanese resturaunt. We had to sit with an elderly japanese couple. (space is used pretty efficiently) It was good though and people respect other's privacy here. We could've had mcdonalds, see pic bottom right, they have neat japanese happy meal toys, Cool!! Oh we'll get one before we come back.
Okay so onto Ikkekeburo....
Oh boy! Blogger.com frose up....ok whatever, back to Ikkekeburro. It's yet another shopping district with a mall about the size of.....oh I dunno, 6 of our local malls. It's called Sunshine City. Inside Sunshine City is a two story amusement park made by Namco called Namjatown. It's a weird as hell park with a huge ice cream museum, a potsticker museum, a haunted section where you can digitally hunt ghosts with an Lcd gigercounter toy, (we did this) A health massage park section....with moniors you stick your face in for brain massaging (not making this up) and a 1920's section where you shoot bug spray at mosquito's using light guns while you ride motorized pigs (we did this too.) All around this park there are little interactive bits you seek out too, like getting a detective Conan (anime people will get the reference) visa and look throughout the park for visa stamps. Then there's also a part where you rent a kitty statue-bot-thingy and attach it to various surfaces for robotic interactivity. It gives you a bunch of computerized info in japanese and I'm pretty sure we'd have enjoyed it more if we fluently spoke and understood the language. Theeeen, there's a walk through a military zone where you wear a headset with an audio player telling you where to find the different clues to stop the G-bomb....whatever that was. Anyways, the whole thing's mascot is a cat that wears clothes simlilar to the white rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland", complete with pocketwatch. Okay...so Namjatown ROCKS!!!
Then we went to another Toys' R Us and I sang a Subway chime to a clerk to find a musical chime subway keychain. Very odd interesting moment that was....he called his supervisor about me....yeah.
So that was the passed 2 days in along nutshell. Tomorrow is Disneyland Tokyo, followed by Tokyo Disney on Sunday. Epect another update after that. Peace out until then.
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