Learn the Japan Rail system... and learn it well!

Well, today started out great.  After my run, Jes and went to McDonald's for breakfast.... Yes! McDonald's, and then decided to make our way towards Suginami to visit the Suginami Animation Museum.  Please note that throughout these blog entries I'll be referring to things that will later be followed by more photos once we get home.  I just don't have time to go through and edit the photos on the SLR on a daily basis.  But I will post some from my phone which I've also been posting on Facebook.  Anyway, I digress.

We did have a bit of a hurdle getting there however, as we soon realized that once we got to the Akihabara Train Stration, none of the maps were in english and therefore we had no idea which ticket to purchase.

In Japan, once at a train station, you simply go up to an automated kiosk, deposit the amount corresponding to the stop on the big map above then receive your tickets.  You then have to figure out which train to take, which is a whole other story.  Thankfuly, I had my trustee pocket wifi and an iPad mini onto which I had already installed 2 critical apps.  The first is an app by Hyperdia in which you enter your starting station and destination station and it tells you exactly which lines to take and where to transfer.  The second is an app called Japan Rail Lite which simply shows you all the lines and their stops.  So all we had to do was figure out exactly which stations we were going to and google its name for the  Japanese "symbols" find those symbols on the map, then get our corresponding tickets.  Later, when we were at a larger train station (Shunjuku) where they had a map with English labels, Jes had the

bright idea of just taking a picture of the english map so we could look at it and not have to google for the Japanese symbols and try and match them on the Japanese map.  Smart kid I have.  My camera on my phone is good enough that I could grab the entire image (above) and zoom in enough to read the labels,

So, back to the animation museum.  The museum itself was pretty cool, small, but interesting. The walk from the Suginami train station to the musem was just as fun.  We then made our way to Nakano for the Nakano Broadway.  This place was incredible.  The street leading up to Nakano Broadway (which is really just a shopping mall) was a narrow covered street lined with little shops and food stops, including a few Sushi restaurants serving sushi from a conveyor belt, one at which we stopped to eat.  Easily the best sushi either of us has ever had, and for about $30 for the two of us.  You have a seat at the counter, plates with pieces of sushi roll by you and you take what you want.  You pay by the plate you take and each different colour plate is priced differently.  After lunch we strolled through all the tiny side streets exploring and by then of that treck, I was ready for a nap before out scheduled show at the Robot Restaurant  The Robot Restaurant is in Shinjuku and Shinjuku is even more alive than Akihabara.  There were thousands of people moving about like hungry ants and lighting that could give Las Vegas a run for its money.  We ended the night (Jes was a bit tired because he refused to nap) with a late dinner at a noodle bar where we both had a great bowl of ramen and pork with hard-boiled egg and seaweed.  Tomorrow we head to the Tsukiji Fish Market

This is the side street on which the Robot Restaurant was located.  Tiny in comparison to the main Shinjuku roads

Jes and I waiting for the show to start