Akihabara

Well, to quote Martin Luther King: "I have been to the mountain-top, and I have seen the promised land". If you mention the name "Akihabara" to a computer geek, chances are the response will be similar to if you mentioned "Mecca" to a Muslim. Akihabara is the techy toy district in a country famous for its techy toys. If you're into computer gadgets, chances are it went on sale here well before you even heard of it.

So, what's it like? Well, from all the talk about it you'd expect it to be a cross between Blade Runner and the Jetsons, with everyone whizzing around on theor own private hover transporters and talking into star-trek type tricorders. Well, it's not, it's just a few streets with a load of techy shops on them - you'll see more neon in Shibuya or Shinjuku. The shops themselves tho are mad, most would be 7-8 floors, with laptops and phones on the first floor, cameras on the 2nd, big-ass HDTVs on the third, DVDs on the 4th, games on the 5th etc - and a big-ass collection of japanese manga/porn in the basement. Some shops vary the mix a bit, but that's the general pattern. Then there are shops which just do comics, or models, all that wierd crap the japanese just love. You see some of that stuff maybe in places like Forbidden Planet back home, but that'd be less than 1/10th the quantity & quality in any one of these stores - and there are plenty of stores. I'd love to have taken some pics to show what they're like, but surprisingly, they have a "no photos" policy in most of the shops....

I've said here before that if my friend Louise ever went to the Silk market or the Pearl Market in Beijing, you'd need a SWAT team and a stick of dynamite to get her out again. Well, this would go double for Vicky in Akihabara, and her fiancee Mick would be no help in shifting her out of it 'cos he'd probably be in the store next door! :-) About the only thing that would limit the average geek's spending spree here is the how much space is left in their credit card account and what the luggage allowance is on the flight home. I wasn't really there to shop, and I was soooo tempted on more than one occasion just to say "what the hell" and break out the plastic!

Having said that, I was disappointed in my #1 search when I was there. The one thing I came here with big hopes of getting is a shiny new mobile phone. Well, I hit one big snag in that regard - all the phones here use CDMA, while back home we use GSM, two totally different and incompatible networks. So, I could buy a phone here, but I couldn't use it at home. Also, the quality of the phones here isn't all that great, looks-wise. They may have all these fancy network features under the hood but on the outside they tend to be all clam-shells with fairly clunky cases. Not what I had in mind at all! There are some GSM phones, but they're pretty much the same samsung, motorola and nokia crap you can get back home - no point really. I can actually get a better (usable) selection in Beijing!

I did however pick myself up a nice shiney (well, black case) Sony Cyber-shot DSC-9T camera! Well, I couldn't come home empty handed now could I? :-)