Long Day in Tokyo

I just had a loooong weekend in Tokyo. I went to an Anime convention and a mall in Odaiba, walked the streets of Ginza, found a Mexican restaurant in Roppongi, checked out some cameras in Akihabara, and browsed the Yamashiroya (big toy store) in Ueno.
First things first. One day Caroline let me know about a big Anime convention going on in Tokyo. Thinking that it would be a good reason to go to Tokyo and also a good place to people watch, I decided I would go. After a bit of back and fourth, Caroline and I decided to go on the last day of the convention. Anyway, to get to Odaiba at 10ish (when the convention started), I had to leave Kitamoto at 8:30ish...not exactly the most fun thing to do on a day off. To make matters worse, it was raining. Yay!
I met up with Caroline and headed toward Tokyo where we were supposed to meet up with some other people (Jason, Tomoe, Mike). On the way Caroline got a message from Jason saying he couldn't make it. One down...two to go. She messaged the other two to see if they were still going. No, and no again. Apparently the weather wasn't looking too attractive to them. Oh well. Looks like it'll be just the two of us today.
We got to Ueno, jumped on the Yamanote line, got off at Shimbashi, jumped on the skytrain and headed toward Odaiba. We made it to the our stop and headed toward the Tokyo Big Site (big convention center). Fortunately, the ground on the way was slick so I entertained myself by running, then sliding across the slippery surface. Not mature, but hey...that's me.
We got into the site and bought our tickets and got in line. As the line moved, anxious otaku (super nerds) tried to cut us in line. We treated it like a game and let them cut then cut them back. Also not mature, but hey...that's us. While moving with the line, I pointed out the obvious fact that you could tell which girls were going to the convention and which were working in the convention. Caroline took immediate offense to that statement, but I thought it was pretty funny.
The convention was filled with the kind of people I thought I would see based on stereotypes and biases. Ha ha. There were the weird "I'm way too into this convention" foreigners, the dorky Japanese adults, the parents taking their kids, and the creepy guys who were just there to take pictures of the models. What a wonderfully complete convention.
Unfortunately, there were only a very few booths that I was interested in. The Gainax production company was showcasing a new cartoon that looks like it'll be a quirky, action/adventure/comedy. I've really liked their art direction in many of their past projects(FLCL for one). Unfortunately, there wasn't much information at their booth, which was more like a coffee shop than an actual booth. Oh well. Another booth that caught my eye was Studio Ghilbi's. This one had a bit of information on a couple of new projects, one that looks like an animated oil painting and one that an animation studio in France made. A couple of other production companies were showing off their new stuff which seemed interesting, but I can't remember their names.
After we got tired of the convention, we walked to the mall at the next train stop. The mall was like any normal mall on the first floor, but the second floor was a bit of a surprise. It was a copy of the Venetian indoor mall in Vegas. What? After getting over the confusion we discovered that it had some cool (but unfortunately expensive) shops. Just next to the mall there was a giant building for showing off new automotive ideas and another building to show off new products. There was a chaircar thing that, if I owned, would probably make me the laziest person in the world. In between these two buildings was a huge Ferris wheel (fish breath black teeth took us where on our first trip to Japan. Remember? Then she took us to eat hot ramen when it was blazing outside with horrible humidity...but she was nice).
The mall got boring as well, so off to Ginza. Ginza is really nice. It's too bad that a word that likes to follow "nice" in Japan is "expensive". Anyway, Ginza is nice. On weekends they close down an entire street to automobiles so that pedestrians can mosey about at their leisure. Pretty cool. In Ginza, we played around in a toy store and looked at various other places before we decided to continue on our journey.
Dinner time! As a special treat to me, we went to Roppongi (jerk foreigner central) to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Let me tell you, I was having serious withdrawals from the lack of Mexican food in my diet. The place was nice, but very overpriced. The food was good for Japan, but about average compared to what I'm used to. It did get me over my cravings though.
After that, it was looking at cameras in Akihabara. That's the place to go if you want electronics...but only if you've been in Japan for less than 3 months. After that window of time, it's not so great (if you buy stuff from Akihabara within your first 3 months in Japan, you can get them duty free). Anyways, we browsed a couple of electronics stores and UFO catcher places until everything started closing. We decided it was time to head back, so we jumped on a train to Ueno.
At Ueno Station, we decided to see if the Yamashiroya was open so we headed out of the station. Fortunately it was, so we headed in to look at the wares. I was able to find a couple of Black & White figurines which I decided to add to my collection (for those who don't know, Black & White is a comic book that features unique art by Taiyo Matsumoto, of whom I've become a big fan of). By this time, our legs were feeling pretty heavy at this point so we decided to call it a day. A very, very long day.

Don't try to introduce those Dick and Jane reading books to Japan

In my last lesson of the day today, the teacher was writing out, "Did _____ become ______ ?", but she accidentally wrote, "Dick _____ become". Unfortunately, practically all of the student's recognize the word "Dick" as an English word for male genitalia. Of course, the whole class burst out in laughter as I hopped over to fix the mistake. As I turned my head to laugh, I made out the students saying various things including "Jeremy's face turned red", "Look, he's laughing", and "Mrs. Koyano is erotic". Just an average day in the classroom I guess.