Day 19 started way too early with my transportation to the airport picking me up at an ungodly hour (5am). Travelling alone can get really stressful without people reminding you to take your chargers or not over sleep, so I paid a bit extra to get direct transportation to the airport so that I didn’t have to worry about missing my flight.

I’ve heard that you can see mount Fuji from the aeroplane for the route that I was taking, but I was so tired that I fell asleep during the flight. Luckily, you can still catch a glimpse of it from Haneda airport. The flight was hardly an hour and upon arriving I contacted my sister who had already been waiting there for 4 hours. My sister also happens to be horrible at directions, and we wasted an hour finding each other because she couldn’t figure out terminal 1 was different from the international terminal.

But anyway, it was smooth sailing from then on. That’s what I wish I could say, but not really. Although we got off at the correct train station, we got a bit lost trying to find our hotel. Let me tell you, walking around in circles with luggage in the cold is not fun. We did eventually find the hotel, which did not have its reception at the ground level. Instead, we had to take a lift to the basement, which was where the reception was.

After checking in, we decided to roam around Akihabara which was a mere 15 minutes away. Akihabara is a geek paradise with everything related to anime, video games and comics. We went absolutely berserk finding merchandise for series and movies that we loved.

We tried our hands at some claw machines and collected some gachapon from the many shops around. If there’s anything that I’ve learnt, it’s to always go for the 3 claw and not the 1 or 2 claws, which are significantly harder. Also, they are most definitely rigged.

We then did some window shopping, looking around at all the figurines and merchandise the shops were selling. Some were really amazing.

There were cosplay costumes, soft toys, manga, key chains everywhere. This place is definitely a must go if you’re into geek culture and all that fun stuff. But be prepared to climb lots of stairs as the shops are usually several stories high and not all of them have lifts.

There are also lots of electronic stores, but that’s not what we were there for, so we ignored most of them. large stores such as Yodobashi Camera and Laox are great though, and have a lot more than just electronics.

We walked around until dinner time. We decided to eat at Sukiya, a fairly popular restaurant chain selling donburi and curry rice, which was on the way back to our hotel. We were dead tired from the walking (34255 steps, my legs were dying) and lack of sleep, so we called it a day after that. Fairly entertaining day, but I think I was too tired to enjoy it fully. But tomorrow’s a really important day – the very reason I took the time to fly to Tokyo!