Local Travel Day

I actually left DK House today! Wooo! It took a lot of effort for me to make myself, haha, but I had to go out and do something for golden week, right?

I got Yoshinoya for lunch on the way to the station and then headed for Akabane! No matter what route we take to...pretty much anywhere, we always end up stopping in Akabane or even transferring trains there. It seemed like a pretty hopping place, but we had never visited, so I made that my mission today! The verdict: Akabane is a pretty cool place! A little ways down the road out of the station, there's a covered street of shops and restaurants called LaLa Gardens. It's really long and had lots of cheap food options and some cheap clothing stores too. The best part, there's a DAISO store there! It's 5 floors! Daiso is a 100 yen store that was one of the places I went all the way to Harajuku to find and turns out there's one right in our backyard, haha. I saw one on my way back at the Kawaguchi station too! There was also a small arcade so of course I had to stop. I thought I saw a woman who was going to play some games, but when I followed her in she was just going to play the slots =/ This arcade was pretty small, but it made it a lot more accessible and friendly-seeming than the one in Shinjuku. There was only one Tekken station, and I challenged a guy and lost =/ My little percentage thingy on my profile is just gonna stay at 0% forever I guess, hah..

The entrance to LaLa Garden

I did some frivolous shopping at Daiso (a bottle of nail polish and two sets of little sock thingies all the girls wear with their uncomfortable shoes to make them more comfortable) and then did some more Akabane exploration. There was a big nice park! It had a really pretty fountain and playground stuff for the kids. The playground stuff here is neat and kind of unique, but most of it is just big concrete animal shapes or whatever, painted a million years ago so they look kind of sad now.. Still not much grass to be found in this park either.

It's a giraffe slide!!!

Woooaaahh!

Camel, Lion, and Squirrel stand watch over the sand pit.
Watch out little buddy!
Hahaha bear in a boat.


I walked back up and under the train tracks to the other side of the station and found a Baskin Robins (I was so tempted to get something... they were having a sale so a 400 yen item became like 240 or something amazing, but I wasn't hungry enough to really justify a whole ice cream cone) and then... Ito Yokado! Haha, it's the big one we can always see from the station. It's the span of the three story one in Warabi, but it's 6 floors! Woah! I was looking for some clothes there but didn't really find anything.. There was a whole clothes mall sort of place across the street though, but it was a little out of my price range.
You know you're in Ito Yokado when you see the glowing underwear mannequins. For serious.

Back to the station and it was time to move on. I needed to do some field research for ethnography, so I went on over to Akihabara. This was my first time going, and to those who don't know, Akihabara is known as Akihabara Electric Town, mostly because you can buy electronics there for cheap. There's also supposed to be a lot of anime stores and such there, but I didn't venture very far into the city before I found a SEGA arcade. It was full of all sorts of different people, lots of girls =) some foreigners.. I saw two people playing the same crane game win digital cameras within 5 seconds of each other! Every now and then I try and win something out of those, but I guess I don't have the touch, haha, and then I think about what I could've bought with that 100 yen I just spent....

There was a pretty big line of Tekken stations on the 4th floor (which was pretty much boys only, as usual. One girl watching her boyfriend play I guess when I left), and after watching for a while, one of the stations opened up with no challenger on the other side! Woo! I jumped in and happily played up to stage 3, trying to sort of train and figure out how the game works a little better, before some guy challenged me =/ I beat him once, but then he destroyed me ~__~ He would hit me with the same move at the beginning of the fight and I would pretty much be done from there. *sigh*

Then I saw that they had the Gundam game on this floor! It seemed kind of crowded, and since it was Akihabara of all places, I felt kind of intimidated, but I saw a little boy and his grandpa buying a card for the boy to try and play for the first time, so I felt more confident and got in line behind them. When it was almost my turn, I got up some confidence and asked one of the guys sitting next to me: "Excuse me, it's my first time trying to play so... are there any important details you could teach me about?" and got the becoming-standard "Err... you're first time playing..um....it's difficult to explain..umm..." look. His friend asked what I'd said, and he told him I wanted him to teach me about the game. I told him I had done the training but not played a game yet, and he looked at my card and said something about that the fact that I had done the training ok was amazing? Iiii'm not sure that's what he said at all, but I think he was trying to reassure me that it would be fine, which was nice, but after that he was pretty much done talking to me. He did say if I wanted to play with them I could wait for the next round, so I did that.

The game has a headset sort of thing where you can talk to the other people on your team. I'm actually not sure if they were on my team or not, but it seemed like it. It was hard for me to say much and I couldn't understand most of what they were saying... except lots of "Sorry" at the end when we lost, haha. I think I said "I died already" and "It's hard to move!" It's a fun game, but it's so hard to get the hang of the controls. Listening to them yell and get frustrated was funny though. My first game I got 4 points but my second one I got 20, so I guess I'm improving a little!

Afterwards I tried to like, initiate some kind of dialog with the two guys by hanging around as they met back up with some other friends waiting for the game. I told the one who had helped me, "It was hard!" but he just smiled and bowed a few times, so I left. I've gotta figure out what to do to get more socially involved with these people if this research is going to go anywhere. It's just weird to me because I know if anyone ever asks me or Nick to help them out with a game that we're really good at, or explain something, it's hard to get us to stop talking about it, because we're excited to share what we know and explain the ins and outs and make sure they have fun. Maybe it's just the nature of this game in particular.

I thought about looking around Akihabara some more, but it was starting to rain a little and I was getting a little tired of walking around. I'll probably go back sometime to check it out since it's fairly close to school. On the way home from our station I got a 7-11 spaghetti dinner which was OK. I'll definitely be eating a lot of Italian pasta when I get back to America =) I also enjoyed some of the Oreo's I bought last week! That's something nice to have here. I ate soo many Oreo's before I left because I thought I wasn't going to get any in Japan, haha. They are kind of expensive though, so that wasn't totally unjustified =)

Now I've painted my toenails (with regrettable results on the first foot unfortunately..) and blogged so I think I'll work on some studying and maybe get a game plan together for tomorrow's studying since it's the last day of golden week! As Nick said, the best part of a four-day weekend is the three-day week that comes after it, so I'm not too worried about this week =) That's it!