This kit was immensely fun to build and looks incredible. I hope LEGO has more innovative ideas like this in the future!
Leviathan
January 27th, 2019Tokyo Brothers
January 22nd, 2019Those of you that follow me on Twitter would have seen a series of daily collages featuring the two of us in Japan. This post features those photos with description.
This was the first, taken at Adores arcade in Ikebukuro. I took the snap of Bernard first, then as we were leaving posed myself with the intention of reproducing the pose of the girl on the right, forgetting Bernard had done the same thing. When I reviewed my snaps later that night I noticed the similarity and a blog series was born!
These were taken outside Tokyo Tower. We’re both standing in front of a large poster put there undoubtedly for selfie purposes. Making these photos daily required scaling and occasionally rotation of the base images so they were best when taken from a distance.
This was taken at the very top of Skytree, which had a special Kingdom Hearts 3 exhibit. We’re both holding the keyblade in a diorama once again installed for photo purposes. I very much like the lighting on Bernard in his shot.
At Akihabara out on the street. This was a window display outside one of the first big game centers near the station. When we returned several days later these posters had been replaced!
Taken at Tokyo Disney, specifically in the Cinderella walk-through exhibit in the castle. The back of the seat has LED lights built into it that animate through a pattern, so we had to time the shots to get similar lighting. I like my pose 🙂
Taken at Nakano mall, posing at the photo-op board featuring their mascot Pipi. It was for kids and we had to contort ourselves to get low enough to put our heads through. Bypassers looked at us curiously…
Once again in Akihabara, standing before a giant poster advertising the new Hatsune Miku cosmetics line. It was very pretty art, but she’s devilishly holding a lipstick with ‘Eat Me’ written on it!
Looking through my snaps, in the 600 or so photos I kept from Japan there’s only 4 that feature the two of us. Three of them were already shown in my blog posts during the trip but I particularly like this last one of us taken on the final full day:
Japan was a nonstop and fantastic end to an overall amazing 25-day vacation. Australia and Japan in one trip?!? How am I going to ever top that??
Tokyo Seven
January 20th, 2019Busy evening right now: packing and writing the last of the post cards whilst pushing through the exhaustion!
We spent the day in Akihabara. We shopped till we quite literally nearly dropped, and as you can see a decent percentage of Tokyo joined us 🙂
We won’t speak of the failed UFO Catcher attempts. As Bernard says, we may as well have thrown our money into the street!
And yet we persevered, and ultimately both won an item or two 🙂
First and second lunch only gave us enough to keep moving, and even now after second dinner I’m still feeling the draining effect of 8 hours in Akiba and another 2 in Ueno. I’ll sleep well tonight!
Tomorrow we fly home. Maybe I’ll do one more post before we leave this fine city!
Tokyo Six
January 19th, 2019Today we went to Yokohama, a trip of a little under an hour south by train. Specifically we went to the Minatomirai district, which is popular with tourists.
Our first stop was the 69th floor observatory (“sky garden”) of the Landmark Tower. Skies were clear and the views were extraordinary! In addition to clear 360 views of Yokohama, we could also see Tokyo (Sky Tree!) and even had a magnificent view of Fuji:
In case you’re keeping track, Landmarks viewing level is higher than Tokyo Tower and only surpassed in Japan by Sky Tree. In one week we’d done the three highest 🙂
Next we headed over to the Cosmoworld amusement park just adjacent to the mall at the base of Landmark.
We of course rode the gigantic wheel (‘Cosmo Clock’) and I rode the coaster you can see before it. We did an old fashioned pedal powered monorail and a weird ghost train in which we were locked in a cage. But the best exhibit was ‘Cave of Shooting: Echidna’:
This was a 3D shooting gallery on rails that was mega fun. Unsurprisingly – and due to my unique combination of marksmanship and monster killing skills – I got the daily high score and received a special card as a prize:
What an accomplishment!!
Of course we also did our daily share of UFO Catching and capsule machines, and later in the day I hopped over to Akiba to buy a few more souvenirs.
We’ll be returning there on our last full day tomorrow, for a bender of gaming, UFO catching and shopping. It promises to be a fun day 🙂
Tokyo Five
January 18th, 2019Today we visited otaku shopping mall Nakano Broadway. It’s jam-packed with dozens of little stores that sell anything a maniac like me may be after.
Tamagotchis, wrestling masks, model trains, telephone cards, jigsaw puzzles, boxed Vectrex games, 1980s Japanese RPG manuals, idol books and CDs, animation cels, Tokusatsu items, ancient stickers from vending machines, sports memorabilia, Michael Jackson merchandise, happy meal toys, RC cars, old signs, toy figurines, electronic music on vinyl, dolls, board games, lots and lots of manga and anime: all this and much more can be found here.
That shows a few of the curious things I saw today, including one of the JP only original gamebooks to complement the FF series (yes, I bought it), two of the rare panoramic game-and-watches and tiny (~2 cm) Ultraman figures from the 1980s.
Even more mind-boggling for me today were the $250 Wizardry PC game guide, the $1000 game-and-watch and the $2500 sticker (yes sticker) that was packaged in candy 32 years ago! Like me, fans of such esoterica are getting older and they’re collections more complete. Naturally prices for the scarce items have risen.
If I lived near Nakano it would be dangerous indeed. There’s so much there is love to collect 🙂
That’s a seafood restaurant a hop and skip from the hotel. As usual the lights at night are often very pretty, and every evening I’m enjoying the view as I write cards.
And then as I started writing this while lying on the bed I suddenly felt very nauseous. Almost immediately thereafter I felt the bed, and then the building shake. This continued for some time (over 20 seconds apparently) and was my first earthquake. It was disconcerting to say the least, if only because it was sustained so we had time to understand it was (still) happening. But the locals were unfazed, probably because it’s already the second this week!
Tomorrow we’re off to somewhere new! Another tower, another Ferris wheel, and what else will we find? Stay tuned…