Anime-me

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We're back in Tokyo and it is hard to conceive that we were entrenched in snow a few days ago. It is by no means warm, but the sun is shining.

Since, being back in the big smoke, we've taken every opportunity to soak up modern Japanese culture. Yesterday, we made our triumphant return to Akihabara (ElectrIc City). We spent most of the day roamimg the arcades, watching people play and playing a few games ourselves. James taught me how to play the card arcade game 'Sangokushi Taisen'. I won some pretty cool cards from playing and I didn't even have to play well. Last night we went out for dinner at a Ramen restaurant. The ramen is 'published in magazine' according to sign out the front, so you know it's good. There was a wide variety of seasonings on the table to add to the ramen if it was not your taste. I had a tasty garlic infused ramen and it was very, very heavy on the garlic.

Today, we went to 'Sunshine City' in Ikebukuro. Sunshine City is a huge shoppig complex containing a number of amusements. The amusement we checked out today was: 'JTown'. JTown is a themepark dedicated to anime. In particular: Dragonball, Naruto and One Piece. We did some pretty fun things here including: Dragonball Dodgem Cars, a One Piece Boatride and a Kamehameha VR game. Each anime also had its own scavenger hunt challenge filled with technology and mini games.

As you can imagine, it was time consuming pretending to be heroes, so we decided to have lunch here. The food at the JTown was just as elaborately designed as the amusements. Each anime had its own menu. James ate a wafer with an anime character's face on it. Delicious.

We speng a little more time perusing Sunshine City (and trying not to spend any more money) before heading back to Shinjuku.

Only four full days left in the country! It is going to be hard getting back to my regular routine- if I can remember what that was...

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