Tom: Shiodome, Akihabara, and Roppongi (April 20)

Shiodome, Akihabara, and Roppongi (April 20) · Apr 21, 12:20 AM

In the morning I walked to Asakusa and did some exercising in the park by the river. I had the same lunch at the same place as yesterday, only today the katsu-don was Today’s Lunch, so it cost 150 JPY less. I checked at several places, but no one had picked up a lost key yesterday, so I had the hostel break into my locker; I don’t know how much it will cost me, yet. That was depressing (though it needed to be done), so I took a nap.

After waking I walked to Akihabara, the electric shopping district. The main street lined with manga shops, Sony, Sega, and duty-free electronics were crowed. The alleys were crowded. The narrow tunnels through the buildings lined with vendors of capacitors of many varieties, dipole switches, multipole switches, pushbuttons, jumpers, connectors, LEDs of all colors, multimeters, needle-nosed pliers, and power cords — those were crowded, too. I ate pineapple on a stick.

Next up: shiodome — an collection of modern skyscraping. Lovely for wandering, but too upscale for my budget. Except that I proceeded to Roppongi where I tracked down Nodaiwa, an unagi restaurant in a storehouse imported from somewhere rural and mountainous. It’s nestled in between high-end auto dealerships — the kind where there are only two cars in the showroom — and an office building with a black monolithic entraince lacking any obvious opening mechanism.

Unagi is Japanese for eel, and Nodaiwa is a high end eel shop. I settled for the simplest dinner — one course of plain grilled eel with wasabi and soy (shirayaki), one course of eel grilled with sweetened soy, and a mint jelly desert.

After dinner I stepped back out into the dark urban jungle and made my way through the strip-club touts to Roppongi Hills. Fifteen hundred Yen buys you a ticket to the art museum on the 53rd floor. The current exhibit displayed the art-world connections between Berlin and Tokyo. There was also a room with ineffably complex metal mechanical organisms, animated and documented scientifically. Their motion was organic and hypnotic.

And the Tokyo City View and bar on the 52nd floor, to which your ticket also gave entrance. I enjoyed this lookout over the sprawling, glowing city.

* * *

People were buying components from street vendors? Our Components Engineers would be appalled!
But it would speed our prototyping…
— malfridi Apr 21, 10:36 AM #

http://tom.spacing-guild.net/2006/04/21/odaiba-april-21

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