Day 68 - Akihabara

I was awoken today by Jason's morning call, and hustled out of bed to have a farewell breakfast - when I got upstairs, after 3 or 4 hours sleep, I was greeted by a steaming plate of Japanese curry, not quite what I would have chosen. Anyway, we said our goodbyes and I went back to bed. Later I went to Akihabara, the electronics centre of Tokyo. The first place I walk into, I see Phil and Mark (the Aussies from last night) - I find out that they haven't yet slept (it's 4 pm) and we decide to combine forces on a search for a cheap PSP. This failed, but we did see a hell of a lot of cool gadgets, including one which I ended up buying - a Game Boy Micro, which I have read about but never seen, as they were never released outside Japan as far as I know. It was only about 25 quid, and worth every yen.

Another thing they have in Akihabara is loads of manga porn - unfeasibly buxom schoolgirls are a common theme, but also pre-pubescent cover stars seemed to feature quite a lot - some of the things I saw were genuinely weird, going beyond quirky and kinky and into the realms of really unsavoury and worrying. Anyway, that was just an aside, I don't feel well enough qualified to make a judgement of their culture based on what I saw today - although myself and, umm, I forget his name but the Japanese guy I met yesterday, had a big discussion about the nature of Hentai, which apparently translates as 'beyond the norm', and as such encapsulates all sorts of weirdness, excess and perversion, sexual and otherwise. This country, as has been said many times before, is full of contradictions and strangeness, not all of it quirky and cool.

Oh also, I have pretty much entirely lost my voice. I can barely make myself heard above traffic, and it is proving to be very frustrating or me, and a source of much amusement for those around me. Bastards.