Akihabara
Our Hotel was very central - 15 min walk from Akihabara and right next to a subway station. There was also a huge fresh market right next to us.
The hotel itself was following the same theme like the last one - very small room, very hard mattress and a robot toilet. 😅 Other than that - nothing interesting there.
Once we arrived, since Akihabara was my number 1 place I wanted to visit in Tokyo and it was within walking distance - that's where we went first.
Akihabara is every geeks wet dream - a Street filled with massive malls and stores for anime merchandise and games. On top of that here we found some of the best places to eat some tasty Ramen.
Here I'm waiting for 'the best Ramen in the area' accoding to reviews on the internet. The queue was longish and the place fairly small. You would order way before you enter so you don't have to wait for your food inside. I'd say it surely was the best ramen we had while in Japan.
The most prominent stores were for anime and games figurines. There were floors upon floors filled with these. Their quality and prices would range quite a bit with the finest ones being really pricey.
There were many buildings with 6-7-8 floors of all sorts of games and anime related merchandise. On upper floors you could find card collecting stores. I’ve never seen something like that before. There were walls of cards on display - I'm talking many square meters of Magic the Gathering, Yu Gi Oh, Pokemon cards and many more. They had quite the collection in some places - selling lots of cards that are fairly common, but also some really rare and very expensive ones. I’ve long stopped collecting these so I peeked just out of interest.
There was a store for anything you can think of. Many giant manga and anime dvd shops. Arcades seemed quite popular here as well. We only walked around inside though and didn't play any games.
Another super popular thing here were the Maid Tea and coffee shops. These anime inspired places had the waitresses and barmaids dressed as maids and kind of mimic the behavior of anime maid characters.
Pet coffees were another thing that would pick people’s interests. There were many variations for these - cat, dog or some more exotic ones. I felt sorry for the latter one. We visited one not knowing what to expect. They had hedgehogs, rabbits and Owls. The Hedgehogs and rabbits were fine I guess but the Owls definitely weren’t very comfortable. They were tied to a wooden stick and visitors could pet them. There were 2 at the place we went to. One was very calm but the other one was quite restless. It was trying to bite anyone that tried to get to touch it and was destroying the stick it was hanging on. These places open after 5 so at least they follow the natural sleeping schedule of these birds but it still felt pretty bad. The rest of the animals you can usually carry to your table while you drink your tea or coffee, so they keep you company. I get how this attracts people but in my book it is on the unethical side of things.
The next place on the list was something Nat really wanter to see - The Robot Restaurant.
Robot restaurant
While we have mostly videos from here, we still snatched some photos too. The Robot Restaurant is one of the weirdest most Japanese places you can go. This place cost millions to build (around 80 000 000$, or so does the rumors say) and it is so over the top that you don’t even mind it. Everything sparkles, everyone wears weird costumes and even before you get to the restaurant bit and enjoy the light, dance and singing show, you get thrown at the weirdness of it all. At first we were queueing in these very sparkly ornamented corridors until we reached a lounge bar where a band dressed as Daft Punk was playing and two female singers were performing western pop songs.
From here we went to the show/eating area. It looks like a mini indoors stadium with seats on both sides of the stage. Dancers, robots and all sorts of weird machines will pop up from both sides presenting mini stories in segments. Between these segments there would be vendors popping in on stage for 10-15 min - selling souvenirs, drinks and popcorn.
Walking through the little corridors towards the stage. There was quite a bit of walking around until you reach the lounge. It is all shiny and sparkly all the way.
The amount of costumes, different machines and concepts they went through was quite impressive.
I’d say for 60$ it's quite the show and definitely worth a visit. You won’t find anything like it anywhere else and it has something for everyone as long as you don't mind flashy lights and loud music and sounds.
Teamlab borderless
Teamlab is the first light museum in the world. I have shared a few places we visited in Bangkok that display great light shows. All of them are however inspired by this place. The venue is quite big with different rooms you can walk in through the corridors. The concepts in each room are different, so is the music setting. It was the first place like that, we ever went to and it did leave us in awe. You enter in this massive space where all the walls are lit in moving images.
Again here we mostly took videos. Almost every room we went to - the lights and images were moving and the music and sounds were usually very nicely sincronized with it. It made a lot more sense to take some videos on our phones back then.
This room was the only one we had to wait in a big queue for. They would allow only a few people in at a time for a limited amount of time - which was good because otherwise it would be pure chaos. The whole room was covered in mirrors and it made it feel endless.
The places we went to in Bangkok were a lot smaller in comparison or at least the separate rooms were. The Forest (which I shared first on Hive) was quite nice but the whole venue was as big as one of the rooms of TeamLab.
TeamLab isn't the only thing in the building. It is a massive Mall that offers a lot of food, some clothing shops and had an interesting car show on the bottom floor. There weren't many cars but they looked quite furutistic.
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Even the people there are like mini machines when it comes to work. :)