We started our second day in Tokyo by wandering around the neighborhood near our hotel. It was incredibly quiet. Many people were heading to work (it was Monday morning), but not a lot was open yet besides the konbini and a few coffee shops.
We attempted to go to a super fancy coffee shop, Glitch, that was on Chris’s list, but the line out the door seemed like it would take an hour at least. It wasn’t a take-away situation, and no one was leaving the shop. He decided no coffee was worth that, so we hit up a konbini for snacks before regrouping at our hotel.
Our new and improved plan was to head to Sotokanda and go to Super Potato, a multi-level video game store. We got on the train and navigated to the area without any trouble. Yay for sleep that refreshed our mental capacities!
Super Potato wasn’t open quite yet, so we wandered around the area checking out all the gachapon everywhere. Not even joking. Pretty much every business had them out front as well as down the alley. Some entire stores were dedicated to them.
Other stores were dedicated to claw and arcade games. We spent some time in both and tried our hand at winning various toys. We were not winners. I started to type “it was sad,” but this is a lie. We had a ton of fun goofing around, and we don’t really need more stuff. I’m quite content with not winning any tchotchkes.
We made it to Super Potato and wandered around the many floors, admiring all the collectibles. We’re not collectors, so all we did was admire.
After that, it was time for food. We headed up the street to a fabulous establishment called Sando Lab Tokyo. Delish!
We did some more planning while we waited for our sandwiches, and I realized we were in the area of Tokyo that had a cluster of 5 or 6 board game stores. Obviously, we had to go check these out, so it was off to Yellow Submarine.
As soon as we walked in, Chris spied the Japanese game I’ve coveted for 2+ years but wasn’t willing to pay for in the States. Into my arms it went. Around the corner was another game I wanted, which also jumped into my arms. And then, there happened to be a really cool-looking game on the New Arrivals table… These are very friendly games that need a new home. How on Earth could I turn them down?
There are barely any pictures. We spent all our time admiring and looking up games. We even went to a second store, which had a fantastic used game section. No games were rescued at that store.
Now, I had planned to visit these game stores on our last day in Tokyo. You know, do some shopping before getting on a plane. Now I have 3 kinda heavy games to lug around Japan for a week, and there’s no room in my backpack for them. Guess I’m going to get a bit more of a workout carrying them and also have to shop for a bag before we fly home!
