Akihabara the "Electric Town"

This weekend is a long weekend for us, which is awesome - unfortunately, the weather hasn't been very cooperative for sightseeing; it's currently snowing. It's not sticking, of course, but it's pretty cold for Tokyo and the snow is very wet and heavy! Because of the inclement weather, we decided to push back our Tokyo Disney trip, which was a bummer. However, I was able to go to Akihabara with a couple of friends the other night and have some fun.

Sega isn't very big back home in the US, but here in Japan Sega is everywhere - and in Akihabara, you can spit and hit a Sega arcade. They're typically six levels or more, and filled with claw machines and huge arcade games, like these:

There isn't much to do in Akihabara except go into huge arcades and spend money, walk through enormous comic book stores and spend money, or get lost in an even bigger electronics store and spend money. Some of the duty-free electronic stores have really cheap, state-of-art cameras, laptops, and other gadgets. After going to several of these stores, I have to say that my intense anxiety over losing my camera has eased up slightly - I know that I can get an awesome replacement one that won't break the bank if I happen to accidentally leave my camera somewhere.

Anyway, I ended up coming back from Akihabara with a few things:

I won this in a claw machine on the first try! These kinds of models are typically at least 2000 yen, so the fact that I was able to get this for only 100 yen was pretty cool! They put the coolest stuff in the claw machines - of course, they make it as hard as possible to actually win the prizes, but I got lucky! I figure I'll give this to my boyfriend, since he really likes these kinds of robot models.

I bought these items at an 8-level comic book store called Animate - they're both from the Miyazaki movie called My Neighbor Totoro - the little stuffed guy is one of Totoro's friends, and the charm has the actual Totoro on it. I'm not sure who I'm going to give these souvenirs to, and I'm not entirely confident that I'll give Chibi-Totoro away to anyone, since I've become rather attached to him... he keeps me company at my desk!

Also, this is completely off topic, but these candies are AWESOME:

They're gummies that taste like green apples - and they don't stick to your teeth like Swedish Fish do! I'm a little addicted to them - I'm gonna have a buy a whole bunch before I leave because I highly doubt they have any thing like this back home!

I'm not sure what's on the agenda for tonight - hopefully this rain/snow mix will let up tonight that we can go out! I'll post again soon!