Japan!

Welcome to Japan! What a trip last week! After doing 3 yrs of Japanese in High School, I have always wanted to go to Japan since! So it was exciting that when my day job said I needed to go there last week for a conference, I was already packed and out the door before they finished their sentence!

So yeah, last week I flew to Japan for work, but was able to have some time to check out the Akihabara Electric town for a few hours. Have to say it was the mecha of anima, manga and gaming. I got a few comments from some of my colleagues in the workshop that they had "outgrown" that part of Japanese Culture, but it had brought back fond memories of their youth. Though I suspect that they were slightly jealous that they couldn't just head down there on the weekend themselves though in reality.

So after a short subway ride down there, which was surprisingly easy to navigate, I came into Electric town to check it all out.

Plenty of gaming stores exist here, and it was quite interesting to see what was available. I just wish that I had more time, or money or both to be here, and could also understand if some of the games would work on my consoles back home. There were quite a few that even in Japanese would be a lot of fun to play and I know that we will never see them in Europe/North America anytime soon.

Only place I really spent any money was at the Anima figurine flea market store thingy.. where people rent boxes, put in their unwanted figurines, and stick a price to them. It was always super busy ( I went back several times before buying something! ) and when I did pick something up it was super easy. Kind of like Ikea where you take a piece of paper, right down the codes, and price, and then pick it up later. Except here a store employee would then walk around with you to pick out the items you wanted.

Later in the evening I headed off to Tamiya HQ and got to see some of the club members there tuning their race cars for the upcoming Tamiya Grand Prix event ( can't remember the date, but these guys were quite serious in their work here! ).

After this is was pretty much all work unfortunately. But an upside was that each night we were treating to a really nice night out for dinner with our Japanese counterparts. Below are some of the foods that we got, and all of it was really really good! Cannot wait for another workshop or something to happen in Japan, and if that doesn't happen soonish, then I might just have to fly out on my own dime cause there is so much that I did not get to see or do while there! Cheers and enjoy!

A nice welcome message from my colleagues while out for dinner on the last night! And that was ice cream, with pineapple, oranges and beans. Great stuff!

Oh and a Turkish kebab place.. which was run by Turks! I think they were surprised when I responded to them in Turkish when they tried to get us to go into their place for some late night doner!