Under the railroad bridge

Hi, it is "Respect-for-the-Aged-Day" today, so I have enough time to update my blog. I went to Tokyo last Saturday, and as I had expected, there were lots of people throughout the capital as people were going to have the three-day weekends.

My friend wanted to drop off at Okachimachi station to buy tennis goods, so we walked from there to Akihabara, when we saw this shopping mall under the railroad bridge. As you can see, it seemed very new, and I found out that it was built just last year. The mall has its own name, "2k540 AKI-OKA ARTISAN".

 I could see many cute shops that sold things like this. 

 As the name "ARTISAN" suggests, many of the shops seemed to be run by people specializing in making artifacts.  

 Would you include Miku in the category of the artifact? As you can see this figurine was in the showcase for people to take pics. 

 As I was walking along the mall, I found this chic coffee shop "Yanaka". The seats in there were all occupied. 

So we were seated on this deck just in front of the shop. It was a mildly hot day, so this iced coffee tasted really nice. It had the strong bitterness I was expecting of.  

 As I was strolling about Akihabara, I saw this pachinko ad truck that featured AKB48. I read an article where a famous music producer said this group's popularity would last for another 5 years. Well, I don't think so. 

 And I came to this restaurant, "Pizza Salvatore" for dinner. My friend's iphone worked very well for us to get here. 

 As it was still warm around 6pm, we dined at this table. 

The name for this pizza was "Diabola". I guessed the name had something to do with devil, because it included many kinds of spice that would energize you like hell.

We came back to Akihbara. The Hatsune Miku ad was for a karaoke bar. It was very impressive to see the Miku lit up in the center of Akihabara in the night. 

I often have unpleasant days as you would, but I want to show you mostly the fun part of Japan in this blog :)

Cheapest Ramen

I went to Akihabara to eat Ramen that many people online said to be very good.

 This Ramen shop "Kimura" was about a 10 minutes' walk from the station. Kimura is one of the most commonly used family names in Japan. I had a few friends whose names were Kimura. 

The taste of this Ramen was relatively good, but what was amazing was the price was only 530 yen, or 6.3 dollars (5.3 Euros). As you can see it had enough volume to make me satisfied. As I waited at the table, people came one after another.  

The last two pics of mine are additional ones. My friend wanted to buy cleaning liquid for his contact lens, so we came to Ikebukuro where almost anything is available.

Ikebukuro can be written as 池袋, and Akihabara is 秋葉原. You can see how far the two stations are from each other by looking at the pic above. A one-way ticket from Akihabara to Ikebukuro is 190 yen. 

And I saw this ad truck on my way back to Ikebukuro station. It was advertising the website E☆エブリスタ where you can upload your own works like novels, manga. And basically you don't have to pay for the works available on the website. 

It started to feel cool in the morning and evening over here. I'm now waiting for leaves to turn yellow :)