Where's Scott?

Ok, so the capsule has a few flaws, one being that if you roll over and hit the wall, you might wake yourself up; and I’m a roller. Clearly I wasn’t drunk enough! Sleep aside, it was cool…

Seb and I decide to check out Electric City and see if it lives up to its name. The first big store we hit is incredible All the variety of Fry’s Electronics could easily fit in half of one of these floors; items are stacked high, there’s barely any repetition, and it goes on and on, floor after floor, cameras, phones, displays, gadgets, gizmos… totally overwhelming. First store.

Hunger quickly overtakes our technolust however, and we start wandering in search of sushi. Electric Town is clearly not a hotbed of sushi restaurants however, and we eventually find a quaint tea house for a coffee and cake. The place is directly out of a history books, and looks like it’s been untouched by modernity for 50 years (and has probably even had the same gaggle of old ladies yapping in the corner for as long!). The coffee is plain black, but the cake is nice, and the house is quiet and meticulously kept, and a welcome escape from the throng outdoors.

After a nice break, we re-enter the madness, and shop some more. The stores here are very busy. They tend to be narrow and very tall, escalators can take you up 8 floors, each one crammed floor to ceiling with all manner of goods from watches to edible underwear, schoolgirl outfits (for play acting) to blenders, fluffy animal pickup game arcades to snack foods and DVDs – and all that on just one tiny floor of the eight! On the top floor of one we find an ice cream cafe and a cabaret theater! There’s no rhyme or reason, just everything crammed in and stacked high.

We decide to head to the pachinko part of town for the next night (“gambling” center, not really legal, but popular nonetheless). My phone doesn’t work in Tokyo, and we haven’t seen an i-cafe yet, so we’re getting a bit concerned about lodging! We grab the train, and impress ourselves by finding our way without help, and hit the new district with a mission. Prices here are much steeper than our capsule, and we don’t find much for less than $150 a night. Eventually we tire of lugging our bags in the cold, and decide to splurge for the Hyatt (not too bad with Seb’s flight crew discount). We check in and I nip downstairs for an espresso: $10! Well, its the Hyatt :P. I drink and sulk over the price, and watch 3 young Japanese girls consume (based on my menu) more than $300 in tiny cakes in about 15 minutes; dollars don’t mean much here I guess.

We jump out to brave the cold and find some nice sushi and sake, and wander the streets a bit. We begin to notice that’s there’s much more to the town than ground floor. There’s a huge variety of restaurants and bars, stores and hotels upstairs and down! We randomly pick a building and hit 5 in the elevator, and discover a tiny (as in fits 10 customers tiny) bar with a really nice chillout groove. We ask “sake?” and get a “we have no idea what you want” look, and reluctantly return to the street to hunt some more. Are we saying “sake” wrong?

We find the perfect sake restaurant, but ah, no credit cards. Out again. It’s getting cold, and we decide to split the sake-sushi hunt, and just grab sushi. We pop into a pachinko hall and realize that we have no idea how this is played; people are holding a handle while small ball-bearings are flying around in front of them, bouncing off pins and sometimes making the cartoon characters in video behind the play do strange things. Hmm, perhaps we should look this up on the web first…