Anime, anime, and oh wait…more anime—the Akihabara Experience!

The Akibahara (Akiba) experience started with my college roommate, Kyoko (Koko), picking us up from our ryokan.  With her help, we were shown what to expect from a Tokyo metro, as we had left using the Chiyoda line to transfer to the JR Yamanote line to get to Akiba.  If it’s your first time using the subway, take your time.  I find that for me, I needed to take a step back and stare at the fare map.  At the Nezu station (where we had started), the fare map was in Japanese and there weren’t any of those useful letter/number designations that I have on my English map.  As such, I just sorta had to play match up in order to determine our fare.

But I digress.  This blog is about Akiba!  So let’s get to it.  Our first stop in Akiba is the Yodobashi-Akiba.  This was an eight story (not counting what I saw as three levels of basement). 

I lost count of how many times we returned to this store after walking away from it.  There was a floor dedicated to cameras, a floor dedicated to phones and accessories, a floor dedicated to models (like figurines and such), a floor dedicated to TVs, a floor to appliances, a floor dedicated to books/manga, a floor to food, and I don’t even remember what the rest were.  All I can tell is you is that this is the very first building we went into when we got to Akiba and this was also the last building we went into before leaving Akiba.  There was just so much to window shop and James was in heaven.

Having said that, we were actually frugal in the spending when it comes to the memorabilia J

After the first time we stopped by Yodobashi-Akiba, we went to several anime related shops, most memorable being the one called Animate.  I think this was seven stories dedicated to anime products such as manga, video, food, and cosplay costumes.  Going through this store gave me ideas for new animes that I might be interested in procuring later on.

After a couple of more anime store stops, it was past noon and we had decided to go have lunch.  Kyoko suggested at one of the places in the food court at the Yodobashi-Akiba and off we went.  Just a note on when I say food court.  I use the term loosely.   Instead of an area with various stalls, it’s more like a floor with various small restaurants.  Once there, we had decided to do lunch at Noodles and Dumpling.  Here are pictures of our scrumptions lunch.  I chose some sort of sesame noodle soup that was really spicy.  YUM!  And of course, we had dumplings.

This is one of the few places where James really enjoyed the meal.   The only downside:  the smokers L  Unfortunately, smoking is allowed at restaurants here and I feel that I may be especially sensitive to it since I’ve not had to deal with the smell in so long.  But the smell of cigarette smoke is very strong to me and it ruined my meal during the time that the lady next to our table was smoking.   There was nowhere else for the second hand smoke to go but linger in the room.

Our next stop was the UDX building, which was supposed to house an Anime Center; however, due to renovations, the Anime Center was closed since last week.  Hence, the only thing we really saw at the UDX building was an anime store and an arts and crafts fair.  A bit of a disappointment.

The next thing up on the list was the maid café.  Read about it on a separate blog here.

The remainder of the evening was spent going into more anime merchandising shops in search of an old Macross 2 CD as well as an artbook from an artist James is particularly interested in.  The CD was old, so even used CD stores (eg. Mandarake) yielded no fruit.  The artist was quite a popular one who just had a book signing two weeks ago, so all the places we went to were out.

The last thing we did in Akihabara was a coffee shop stop to replenish our energy and dinner at the food court in Yodobashi-Akiba.

Coffee was at a German coffee shop that I could only describe as ten steps above Starbucks in terms of the atmosphere, the clientele, the staff, and the price!  Don’t get me wrong.  It was GOOD.  My Café Mocha was excellent.  But I do gripe about the small portions and the seemingly exorbitant price.  Is it the shop or is it just Japan?  Koko and James both had tea and it came out in this fancy French press.  My café came in a regular cup (granted it’s the skinnier version of its American counterpart).  Still.  Sorta pricey.

Because we ended up at Yodobashi-Akiba again late in the evening, we decided on dinner at one of the places on the eight floor again.  I think the restaurant was called Faikyoka. Here are some pics of our meal.

The Spread

The calamari

The raw potatoes

Forgot what it's called, but it's essentially a deep fried cottage pie

Deep fried chicken cartilage

It was a lot of food.  I had told Kyoko that whatever we don't finish she should take home with her.  But guess what?  Who knew there were no doggy bags in Japan?  She wasn't allowed to take it home!! So, just remember...most places in Japan don't do doggy bags!

Now, I know what you might say at the end of this blog.  “Hey, Rebecca, where are all the details?”  Honestly, I don’t know.  You may have to read James’s blog when he finally decides to write it because for the most part, I just followed where Kyoko and James led.  Yes, I love anime, but it’s been awhile since I’ve really ever been interested in their merchandise.  I will link James’s blog here once he writes it.