Better photos later, for now here’s our first view of Japan once the cloud broke.

Guess I’ll start the ball rolling in this. My first day was spent traveling down to London. All easy so far. Found hotel, spent hours waiting for TheThing to arrive. He arrived. We ate. Smooth sailing still.

Now bear in mind I’m from a small town, so I’m used to just walking to get places.

With that in mind myself and TT set off walking. An hour and 20 minutes later we have walked God knows however many miles around Heathrow and found no way in. So I shout and ask some cop who is on the other side of the fence. His reply? “You guys are making me dizzy walking around.” Thanks for offering to help earlier rather than just watching. Dickface.

Anyway, finally got inside, bumped into Holo and Sarasmith at checkin, followed by former Doki staff Jecht and his gf. Teg not here yet. So we head on in, get ripped off in duty free, board plane. Teg not here yet. Pretty much everyone is now on the plane and some Japanese woman is eyeing up Teg’s seat. Teg finally arrives 3 minutes before they close the gate. He can fill in the details later on this.

Flight is uneventful, highlight is when TT spots some kid colouring in a precure book. We land, holy crap my ass is hurting from sitting down so much.

Soon as we leave the plane/walkway we are hit by a wall of heat and humidity. Anyway, immigration, get bags, Teg gets short changed 200 yen on his very first purchase in Japan and then we go looking for odinigh and sakurahime. Supposed to be meeting them at starbucks so that’s where we go. No one is sure what sakurahime looks like, so just randomly shout sakura into the shop. No one replies so we mill around a bit. I get my photo of odin out and I’m like “this is who we are looking for”. Jecht points right past me and is like “so him”. Sure enough odin is sat right near the door with sakurahime 😀

Anyway train to hostel we are staying at, take a load of photos, saw first sailor uniform school girl, hit up McD’s for food first then arrived at hostel over an hour before checkin… Decide to go to Akihabara… So we head on down to Akihabara, main aim being to pick up a sim card so we can actually get in contact with each other. So at this point nearly everyone piles into a tiny phone shop, cos why the fuck not? Myself and teg decide to go looking for porn instead and just wonder off checking out where the shops are.

So I grabbed a couple of railgun s2 mousemats/desktop mats and then found a new/wrapped copy of Tanukisoft’s VN “Mei Shoujo”. Success. My night was pretty much complete with that purchase, left me short of my main aim, a later Tanukisoft game, “Mebae”. But good enough for day one. Teg and myself decide to head on back to the hostel since we have no idea where anyone else is at this point.

So we take a walk back to where we think the station is, get there and are about to walk up to the map and see where we need to go when some random Japanese dude walks up to us and asks us where we are going. He tells us in broken English we should follow him for 2 minutes. We tag along and he takes us to another station entrance instead and leads us down to the platform we need and checks we have money on our cards to get on the train. So we thank him, thinking he was just been helpful, when he decided to bow and clasps his hands together, while saying “hungry”. We both dip into our wallets and each hand the guy a 500 yen coin. Apparently this is really fucking good cos he screams “woooooowwww” at us and then grabs and shakes teg’s hand while repeatedly saying thank you to us. We proceed to get the train back to near hostel, grab some onigiri and some piss weak cold tea from a vending machine and that pretty much sums up day one-ish.

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By Holo:

While in Akibahara, Ix and Teg split off from us and went and did their own thing. The rest of us wandered around Akiba a bit, checking out various shops etc. We decided to go to Big Echo Karaoke as the final thing to do that day.

While the pricing for the actual karaoke wasn’t that expensive (320 yen for an hour or something), it was compulsory to buy a drink and all the stuff on the menu had extortionate price tags… In the end the food costed more than the karaoke! Anyway, the rest of us all got into a room and surprisingly, we all fit in. The room was pretty big. Anyway, the machines that you chose songs on required song title/artist name entered in hiragana, so only Sakura and I were able to use it effectively. The songs had subtitles on the screen, but they were also in hiragana/kanji/furigana, so you had to be able to read to sing. Mostly people could only sing the first verse or so, because OP/EDs don’t sing the whole song, but the karaoke does the full version. The music video they played often had absolutely nothing to do with the song, and the remix of the song played was quite strange. It wasn’t just an off-vocal version of the song that would be released on the CD single.

So we messed about for an hour, before the staff rang us on the phone and told us time was up. We quickly scoffed down whatever food was left and left. We went back to the station and returned to Minowa Station. We did some shopping for tomorrow’s breakfast, which basically involved cleaning out the entire supermarket of melonpan. At this point some of us were hungry, and some weren’t, so the ones who were fine went back to the hostel first. TheThing, Stef, Sara and I were hungry and we found a cheap ramen place outside the station. After that, we also went back to the hostel.

Everyone was pretty tired after everything, so we didn’t do much and all went to bed.