The crazy place that is Akihabara & the World Cup

This is killing me cuz I want to write about last night - the Japan vs Paraguay match! but I MUST write in order... so bare with me... or skip straight to the video at the end!!!

Yesteraday we went to a place in Tokyo called Akihabara. We had read 3 main things about this place;

1. It is the place to be if you are shopping for anything electronic/computer related,
2. It has a massive Anime/Manga scene (Japanese animations and comics), and
3. It has rather alot of maid cafes... these are cafes were girls/women dress up as maids and serve business men. 

I I must say I was extremely intrigued by these maid cafes. To be fair, I only had a peek in one cafe, but I didn't feel comfortable enough to actually go in so I guess I can't really comment. However, from the 5 seconds of peering in I noticed that the girls there were quite young, and the customers were mainly business men. From what we have seen in both Akihabara and Harajuku I think it is fair to say that there is a certian eccentric fashion among the Japanese teenagers that hang out there. I think these girls must take on a role, much like they do in Harajuku when they dress up as their favourite Japanese anime character because all the adverts for the maid cafes show anime characters and not actually girls...

This girl here is not dressed as a maid, but she was on the street advertising her shop - I was asked not to take photos of the maids. So fair enough. I'm getting into the habbit here in Japan were you can just take photos or anything and everything because the majority of people love having photos taken of them... and they are always very apologetic when they ask you not to take photos... I must learn the Japanese word for sorry... zennen desu, zennen desu, anyway... enough about maid cafes (sorry for going off on one there!)

 Ok so electronics yes. it was crazy all the shops here go up into to the top floors of every building, it takes some getting used to just getting into a random lift and pressing a random button just to see what shop you end up in! So there were floors and floors of everything you could ever imagine needing, wanting - Very surreal!!! and the anime thing... ok, floors and floors of arcade games... all devoted to the japanese anime. Kind of looks like a casino for kids (haha). Oh by the way pretty much all gambling is illegal here... I heard something about a loop hole though... hm I don't think we need to get into that right now!!! There were loads of anime comic stores most harmless... but lets just say we walked into a particular shop that happened to be full of men (it was an "adult" cartoon book store)... and the nicest way to say it is I have definitely been scared for life... so I won't be going there again!!!
Below is a picture of the nice anime book store :-)

It was tiring a tiring day... but we were soooo ready to go out to watch the match. We thought we could see if they were showing it on the big screens at Shibuya crossing, that would of been great but they wern't. :-( How ever we had a great night. This video will explain it better than I ever could...



Ok so when we figured out that they wern't showing it on the big screens we wanted to find a bar to watch it. Everyone was at the crossing watching tv on theirs phones or listening to radios. We did actually find a pub to watch the last half an hour in - it was lovely. Just a small pub maybe enough room for 20 people max. and everyone was talking to us... it was so nice... made me want to learn Japanese!!! Fran has been feeling extremely fragile today though, hehe. Hopefully when we wake up tomorrow we will both feel great! We are off to the Zoo tomorrow!!! WOOP oh my god we are going to see pandas... in real life!!!! Watch this space!!!!