Week 3
After writing Week 2's entry last Sunday, I went to meet up with a guy via meetup.com who wanted to talk about robots and artificial intelligence. It was a good chat and he has some connections with Tokyo University so I'm excited to see if it will lead to some connections of my own down the line.
Monday and Tuesday were fairly standard work days although it still feels as though my body forgot to turn off the "drift sleep patterns" setting which I used to overcome jetlag a few days before. On Wednesday, I left work with some coworkers to play badminton at a gym located in a nearby school. It cost about $2 to get in and the locker was 10 cents. It was really fun and great to work out and have fun outside the office.
The rest of the work week was mostly me being home trying to figure out how to sleep again and beating Mario 64 using the Endless Stair cheat which I did successfully for the first time. I was very proud.
On Saturday, I skyped Sarah who was babysitting my almost 3yr old niece Leila. It was great to see them both and also convince a 3 year old that if she put her plastic egg and grape toys under Sarah's laptop then I'd get them in Japan. I was able to do this because my computer is right next to my fridge.
On Saturday, I went grocery shopping and found some Grilled Brats and also tried some really good noodle seasoning that an employee was presenting.
Today, I set out to do one thing: got to the Pokemon Center Mega Tokyo.
It turns out, that Sunday was a good day to go. The Pokemon Center is a store that sells Pokemon related things and is located in a mall called SunShine City. The mall is next to a park and when I showed up at the park, it was full of people wearing cosplay, taking professional pictures of cosplay, or selling stuff related to cosplay. I have been to a few events similar in Canada but after asking someone, I found out that this happens every Sunday. EVERY SUNDAY. These weren't the shoddy costumes that people throw together last minute. There was thought and care put into each costume. As for me I was wearing my usual cosplay event clothing: jeans and a tshirt. After walked around a bit and recognizing many costumes, I went in the mall in search of the Pokemon center.
Following the crowd into the mall, the bottom floor of the mall was devoted to board game and video game tournaments with some game I had never heard of. From the sign that I saw there, I guess the cosplay and the gaming are both put on by some group called "acosta". I walked around a bit more, but really wanted to find the Pokemon center. I asked a passing sailor scout where I could find the Pokemon center and headed that way.
I finally entered the shopping part of the mall at this point and heard a bunch of cheering. Since the cheering was in the direction of where I had been pointed, I decided to check it out. I found a Jpop band because of course I did.
The band playing is called Solidemo and had just released there latest single "Happiness". I'm very confident the song was about happiness and shiny days but I had no clue what they were saying but it sounded nice.
After Solidemo was finished singing, I continued my search. I found two theme parks before I was able able to find it. Jworld is a theme park that is based on many popular anime shows such as Dragon Ball Z, Naruto , and One Piece to name a few. It has a bunch of cool virtual reality games and the most hilarious "ride" meant for children where employees wearing ridiculously large masks of anime characters help the children climb through an obstacle coarse and defeat some enemy.
NamaJaTown was the other theme park I found. I'll be honest... I have no idea what it is and I don't recognize any of the characters. I was too confused and frustrated with not seeing some Pokemon that I didn't try and find out.
Finally, I found the Pokemon center and it was packed with people and Pokemon stuff of every kind. It was great.
After leaving the Pokemon center, I went to the 9th and top floor of the mall where there was the Sunshine aquarium. I wanted to scope it out before Sarah and I go there later in the summer. The aquarium had a special event where they were showing poisonous animals. Essentially, everything thing that they were showing in the one room could kill literally everybody in the room. I was hoping that maybe there could be a petting area like in Finding Dory but I can understand why the aquarium didn't opt for that.
Speaking of petting though, on the way home from the mall I saw a Rabbit Cafe. Its a place where you can have some coffee and play with a rabbit. I was tired by this point so didn't go but its definetly on the list of cafes I want to go to. My current list of cafes to go to is:
If you find other cafes in Tokyo, let me know.
One the other side of the street from the rabbit cafe was a movie theater, maybe I'll check out Beauty in the Beast while I'm here and see how the different songs sound in Japanese. Then I'll finally be prepared for Japanese Disney Karaoke.
