After a few days of nice weather, the skies in Tokyo clouded up and gave us a little rain to contend with. It’s currently sprinkling a bit right now and the locals are out with umbrellas.
It’s days like this that it’s nice to sit inside and enjoy some delicious taiyaki…
Yesterday was another light day of photos and heavy on shopping. We hit Nakano early in the day to check out some of the shops around the station. It seems that everything opened after 11am, so we ended up loitering for a good half hour before the first place opened. It was a bit desolate in the shopping plaza until then.
Important safety tip for those wanting to do some otaku shopping outside of the station: the first stores don’t open until 11 and the majority open at 12. Mandarake runs most of the places and none of those open until 12. We spent a couple hours browsing the various shops and I managed to spend a whole bunch of money (probably more than I should have). There were a bunch of shops that featured interesting collectibles beyond just figures and posters. I picked up a few packets of original concept sketches and a some production notes used on an actual series. They’re very cool little one-of-a-kind item and actually handled by the folks working on the show.
After a few hours of shopping, we went hunting for food and found a small ramen shop in the main area of the shopping mall. I’d seen pictures of the ticket machines for food, but never actually used one. For the uninitiated, many smaller restaurants employ the use of a vending machine for taking payment for food. This alleviates the need to have a cash registers and a payment process and helps automate ordering an cash collection. Patrons insert money into the machine, select the menu items they want, and hand the resulting ticket to the wait staff for processing. A couple minutes later, they bring you your food.
Once finished, we stopped by a Taiyaki stand before getting on the train back to Shinjuku. Since we were already full from lunch, we got the Taiyaki to go. It looked delicious but sadly neither of us could stomach eating any more. It was then back to the hotel to drop stuff off so we’d be able to get more stuff in Akihabara. There were still a couple things on our buy list, including another SP-box for Fate/Unlimited Codes. Apparently I really lucked out with that find and we’ve been struggling to find another one for around the same price.
My friend however, got back at me by beating me to this little gem…
He also got a really good deal on it, as it being sold for 17800 Yen. We’re not sure how or why it was priced that low as it originally went for 98000 Yen. It was certainly preowned as there was some staining on the neck and shoulders, but the rarity should easily cancel that out. We suspect it was mismarked by one zero, but aren’t sure. Either way, I got him to adopt his very first daughter. Now it’s off to Tenshi no Sumika to get accessories… :)
I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to what’s in those bags… for now!
