11/14/2010: "Tokyo Day 6 (Harajuku, Akihbara)"

Wow, have 6 days already gone by? Ridiculous. So we didn't really do much today either, but it felt way more successful. We got up a little bit late (we've mostly been getting up around 7:30 or 8, but today we slept till 9) ate some breakfast and hoofed it on down to Harajuku to check out the scene, as they say. It turns out the scene is perhaps a little overstated. We saw a few subculture types, but really other than being way more busy it wasn't all that different from Harajuku on any other day. Wrong time of year, perhaps?

So we walked around a bit and finally decided that we'd seen what there was to see and thought we'd head back to the station to see if Akiba was a little more jumpin. On a whim though, we thought we'd go grab a crepe to tide us over till lunch and on the way to the crepe place we had in mind, ended up wandering down a random side street/alley and coming across the Baird Beer Harajuku Taproom. And since we were kind of hungry we thought, hey why not.

And lo, it was good. Well, actually it was pretty expensive (900 yen for a pint... yikes!), but the food was fantastic (we had some beer chashu pork, and a beer chicken curry... they were both ridiculously tasty) and the beer was really good, and the staff was awesome. (The manager didn't speak a ton of English, but had taken a trip to Portland a couple weeks earlier so we chatted with him a bit about Portland in general and west coast beers. He was really nice guy.)

After that we went and got our crepes and then headed back to the station and over to Akihabara. It turns out the cosplay scene in Akiba was also a little bit overstated today, but we did see a few cosplayers wandering around (other than all the maid cafe girls, that is). So after walking around again and me losing 700 yen on ufo catchers (oh spherical plush kitty cats, why will you not be mine?) we decided to do a bit of shopping. We hadn't hit Animate on the previous visit to Akiba so we decided to check that out first. We found a few things there, mostly some Sargent Frog stuff (not that there was a ton, apparently my love for the Sargent is about 10 years out of date).

Then we went to the Akiba Book Off and picked up a couple things then walked around the giant Yodobashi Camera there for awhile before deciding to drop back by Mandarake. This time I couldn't resist and dropped about 5000 yen on manga. Mostly classic stuff that's hard to find in San Diego... Astro Boy, GeGeGe no Kitaro, some stuff by Katsuo Umezu, that sort of thing.

After that we decided to get some dinner at a ramen place we had passed earlier and Lynnea thought looked good. Sweet jumping monkeys, was it ever. I had the tonkotsu ramen, garlic flavor. Which meant that it had a thick black layer of roasted garlic oil on the top of it. So. Insanely. Good.

After that we headed back here and that's about it. Not sure why today felt more successful than yesterday, maybe the fact that we got a bit of shopping in and ate two incredibly tasty meals. Dunno. Anyway, tomorrow we're actually getting out of the city for a day and heading down to Kamakura. Should be fun...