Sumo

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Monday 14th Jan 08
The plan for today was to get up early and go into Ryoguku to line up for Sumo tickets. Well it was a good plan until about 0715 when we decided to have a sleep in. An hour and a half later we finally got out of bed and down to the train station we eventually got to the Sumo stadium around 1100 (tickets sales opened at 0840) only to find a “Sold Out” sign in the window. Luckily an English speaking lady in the ticket office came over to us and told that they keep a few tickets or dumb-arse tourists like us who turn up late, so for the princely sum of ¥2100 each ($25.00 AUD) we got some tickets. Although the bouts go all day, the higher level ones don’t really start until about 2 or 3 o’clock, so we decided to go in to Akhibara, which is also know as “Electric City”. This district of Tokyo has a lot of electronics shops, from the latest and smallest laptops to lots and lots of phones. We kept looking at each other after looking at a tiny laptop and saying “so that’s only $400, right?” there was a huge choice of cheap, low spec, tiny laptops but for the most part it was mainly high/mid end laptops in the $2000 - $3000 region. After a few hours of looking around it was time to get back to the Sumo. It was amazing, the stadium, the atmosphere, the sport. Un fortunately we didn’t really know what was going on, other than two fat guys trying to push each other out of a four and a half meter circle, but it was entertaining. After the final bout we headed into Tokyo and Ginza where we just walked around looking at all the lights of the city and some high end shops. After all of that we jumped on a train and went back to the hotel

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