The Butt Ugly Weblog

Wednesday evening, all electrified

Evening: So, after a quick stroll around Ginza, we walked through Kanda to Akihabara, and particularly its Electric Town. Later on, we were met by a fellow JSPWiki user, Murray, who was kindly took us to a all-you-can-eat shabu-shabu place - a place we would not have found in a million years. It really makes you wonder how the Tokyo-dwellers actually find these restaurants anyway: the competition must be fierce, and being on the 8th floor of some obscure building with six other restaurants makes standing out... difficult.

By the way: If you don't know what Akihabara is, let me paint a picture for you: Imagine the biggest electronic shop that you know. Now, take away all extra space, and imagine all the stuff in a room that's about the size of an average living room.

Then, put six on these on top of each other, and connect with a stair case.

Put ten of these in a row.

Put ten of those rows in columns.

Now, imagine 50 blocks of those, packed tightly with nary a room for a small cafe or a soba bar between them.

Decorate with the amount of blinkenlichts equivalent of New York during Christmas.

Populate with 200,000 people, coming and going, shouting advertisements, selling and buying.

Akihabara.

It's The Place.