Neo-Tokyo Tour, Intermixi - Spring in Japan, Days 6 and 7

It seems like I'm slowly winding to the end of this adventure. Day 6 opened up bright and clear. There were no plans set for our group this day. This was our designated "free day" and I had no definite plans to spend it in any specific way. My roommate, Travis, wanted to take me to the Nakano Broadway, which is essentially a large shopping mall comprised of many specialty shops.

We left for Nakano late that morning. The plan was to get there, have a little bit of lunch, meet up with some other people and then spend some time shopping. We took the JR trains from Ikebukuro to Nakano, and open exiting the station at our destination we set out to find some food. The station opened up across the street from the Broadway, but since we had some time to kill before meeting up with our companions we decided to go exploring. Surprisingly, after being in Japan for about 5 full days at this point I still had not eaten any sushi. Therefore, the goal was to find a sushi restaurant.

We wandered the backstreets a bit looking for any place that caught our eyes. As we moved further and further away from the station, we happened upon a small sushi restaurant that had just four seats to serve people. There was already one older gentleman finishing his meal there, and he was talking to the proprietor while a Japanese baseball game was on the TV. I must admit, I believe we surprised both men a bit by coming in to eat. They both seemed quite amused at two gaijin trying to order food in Japanese. But don't get me wrong, they could not have been nicer and I felt very welcome there. The proprietor admitted to knowing a little bit of English, and he asked us where we had traveled from and if we were in Japan on vacation. We told him a little bit about ourselves and enjoyed a very fresh, tasty and filling meal.

After lunch, we met up with some friends and made our way through the Nakano Broadway. I doubt any of you are really interested in hearing about our shopping adventures, so I'll just skip ahead ...

... once we were all finished emptying our bank accounts, we went back to Ikebukuro and towards our hotel. I had mentioned earlier (I think) that for the second half of the trip we stayed in the Sunshine City Prince Hotel. What I didn't clarify is that Sunshine City is a building complex in Ikebukuro that encompasses a shopping mall, aquarium, planetarium, museum, convention center, theatre, etc. It also houses the Namco Namja Town (Wikipedia entry here), pictured above this paragraph. Essentially this is a small, indoor theme park and as you can probably tell the mascot characters used throughout the entire place are cats. Now before any of you question my sanity, I was "convinced" that I needed to check this little tourist-trap out. I will admit it was kind of amusing, and they had an entire section of the park devoted to serving different kinds of ice cream, which were all delicious. And they did have a curry restaurant that served surprisingly good "kitteh curry". After running around all day, it was about time to turn in. But I had one more errand to run.

This is a good friend of mine, Dan, who is currently living and working in Tokyo, Japan. I have actually been friends with his entire family for a long time, since about 4th grade, and when I made the decision to take this trip to Japan I knew that I would make time to go visit him. After my escapades in Nakano and Namja Town, I met up with Dan after he got off of work. We ended up walking along the streets of Takadanobaba, drinking and talking about life and other things. It was really chill, and really great to see him again. I keep up with him online, but that is nothing like catching up with someone in person. Unfortunately, I could not stay out all night. I had to get back and start getting ready because on the next day we were leaving Japan.

Day 7 really cannot be considered much of a day. We really only had the morning to do whatever last minute things we wanted. By noon, we were pretty much loaded into a shuttle bus and we were back on the way to Narita Airport. From there, we all boarded our respective planes and flew off for a 9-hour flight back to the States.

Check back shortly for final thoughts on the trip, the people I met and rode with, and overall experience.