Tokyo trip with uncle Tim

We started the night on the train to Tokyo. It was about an hour ride. On the way to the Inage station, we saw the sun setting.
It was a pretty nice view. We also saw it a bit on the train, but I didn't manage to get a picture of it. I still got a nice looking shot though.On the way there, uncle Tim showed me our destinations on his map of the Tokyo train system. At first glance, the map is a web of confusion and despair.
It is actually not that hard to find things on it though. Before the day of, I had no idea what we were going to do in Tokyo. Turns out uncle Tim had a pretty good plan set up for us.

So Akihabara was our first stop. For those not acquainted with Akihabara, it is a large electronics district in Tokyo. Probably the best place in the world to go to find anything electronic. It was really cool and interesting. I am definitely going back there in a week or two to get some audio equipment. I have badly needed a new pair of full sized headphones for a couple of months. I am always hesitant to make an investment like that though.

We went to a building that had 8 floors of stores. 7 of the floors were dedicated to misc electronics. The top two were a restaurant and something else. I went around and looked at different speaker systems and headphones. I found one of each that I thought would be a good purchase, but I decided to wait to buy them. I didn't want to drag that stuff around the rest of the night. Here is a picture of the building's floor guide.
And a picture of the building from the outside
Just walking the streets of Tokyo is cool because of all the different people walking around. One thing you never see in the states that is everywhere here is salesmen shouting about their product out on the streets into a microphone. I took a little video of the street just to give you an idea of the atmosphere. Really nothing exciting in this one.


Here is a picture I took when we were walking down the road.
I'm not sure if this was in Akihabara or what, but we went to see Tokyo's equivalent to New York's Times Square. This is supposed to be the busiest intersection in the world. There certainly were a lot of people there. Here is a view of the intersection from the street.

And here is the view from the Starbucks we went to.


After we were done looking around Akihabara, we went back on the train to get to a sushi restaurant that my uncle likes. Here is another picture of a map of the subways.

Some pictures of the subway.

One thing you will notice is the yellow lines on the ground. I thought they had those on the sidewalks to separate pedestrian and bike traffic, but uncle Tim said that it was for blind people. It being down in the subway and having the different patterns at corners and intersections with the road really makes sense. This next picture shows a fairly packed train.
So we got to the sushi restaurant. It turned out this was one of those conveyor belt sushi places. It was mostly nigiri sushi which is the chunk of raw fish on some rice. It was delicious. Here is me being awkward for the camera.
And here is the series of sushi I picked off the conveyor.

This was some good salmon with a cheesy topping. It was one of my favorites. Who doesn't love salmon?

This one looked interesting, so I grabbed it. I didn't realize the purple and gold plates were the most expensive. It wasn't very good either. They all were kind of bland. I asked the chef what was in the yellow one, it apparently had nuts and such in it. I asked him in Japanese, he responded in English. His English was very good. It was kind of funny because uncle Tim comes here fairly often and recognized that guy, but he didn't know he could speak English.

I am not sure what kind of fish this was. It had a very light flavor and had a stronger hint of lemon to it than the others.

I grabbed this one because it looked like there was beef jerky on the rice. I think it may have been jerked fish or something. It was kind of a more moist, fishy jerky. I enjoyed it.

I am not sure what fish this was, but it was delicious. It was very tender and had a sweet sauce on it. There is rice under that monster btw.

This was my last sushi. It had a cheesy/mayonasey sauce on it. It had a bit of a smoky flavor to it. This one was also very good. I think it was kind of funny that I inadvertently showed the plates piling up in the corner of each picture. Here is a picture of Tim's and my plates at the end of the meal.
The way they tallied up the price in the end is that they had RFID's in the plates, so someone just came over and swiped each plate over a device, quick and easy. Here is the shop as we were exiting.
The spouts at each seating area you see are hot water dispensers for green tea. There was a box of tea bags at each place. The good English speaker is on the left bent over working on something.

Now we were off to an Irish pub! It was kind of hidden in the city a bit. We both got a pink of Kilkenny which is a beer is managed and produced by Diageo. They also make Guinness. This was very much like Guinness but with a lighter color and flavor. It has the exact same texture and feel to it. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I don't think I like it better than Guinness. Here is a picture of the Kilkenny still in the frothing stage that Guinness is famous for.
The absolute worst thing about Japan is the price of some of my favorite beers. Here is the menu they had displayed at the pub we went to.
There was no cover charge for entering the place at least.

It had a live band playing with all Japanese members except for the singer who was a white woman. They did covers of misc classic rock like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. They were fairly good. I enjoyed the show.
Concerts like these are always hard to photograph because it is dim and using flash is not an option unless you want to be a total dick to the performers. After a couple of songs, we had to go because uncle Tim needed to get back to his hotel. It was a really fun night. I'll probably take some people down to Tokyo and do something similar later on. here is a picture of us on the train home. I kind of cut uncle Tim's face out a little bit accidentally.
Thanks uncle Tim for a great time!