I can’t begin to say how exciting and brilliant this all is! I’ve put some photos below of the inside of the flat, and one of the view, but they don’t really do it justice so you’ll just have to come out here and see for yourself.
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| Our lounge / dining room looks over the city towards the east. It's all very beautifully decorated. I'm surprised that it's not super-scary being so high but I think it's just so amazing that there's no room left to be scared! |
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| Our bedroom has the same incredible view as the lounge. It's amazing to wake up to this in the morning. The spare room also has this view so if you come and stay with us you'll be able to see it too! |
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| I'm totally in love with the bathroom, which has more storage space than I could shake an entire bushel at. I'm going to have to work really hard to fill it up and take full advantage! |
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| I know you'll all be dying to know about the loo... We have two, they both have an electronic control panel and yes, these ones are different to those in our previous flat. The fun starts all over again. |
Having exploded all our things into the flat on Saturday, we opened the very tasty bottle of champagne that our letting agent gave us as a moving in present. Terribly civilised!
We spent Sunday in Akihabara Electric City shopping for a LAN cable with which to connect to the internet so I can carry on writing this blog, among other things. We also walked along Chuō-Dōri avenue in Ginza, which is a huge road that gets pedestrianised every weekend so that the shoppers can roam free. We roamed into the Apple store where Simon bought an i-pod shuffle to enable him to listen to Japanese language teaching tapes on his commute to and from work. Don’t get too excited about electronics though – the current exchange rate means that all Apple products are roughly the same price as in the UK, while Japanese products actually seem more expensive. We will, of course, be doing more research into this because I think I’d like an electronic dog and a cleaning robot among other things…
One of the more amusing moments was when we accidentally strayed into the adult section of a DVD shop in Akihabara. We’ve been looking for a copy of Lost in Translation since we’ve been here and found a shop selling DVDs so we thought we’d check it out. The ground floor yielded nothing, so we went upstairs and found ourselves in the porn section. As well as the ‘regular’ blue movies, there were also shelves and shelves full of anime (the moving version of manga) porn. Shops like these are definitely worth a quick look, even if only to marvel at the sheer number of furtive-looking middle-aged men standing around rocking with their hands in their pockets. We didn’t hang around for too long.
Here are some photos of the things we saw on Sunday (not including the anime porn!)
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| Our stunning view looking particularly good in the early morning sun |
We spent Sunday in Akihabara Electric City shopping for a LAN cable with which to connect to the internet so I can carry on writing this blog, among other things. We also walked along Chuō-Dōri avenue in Ginza, which is a huge road that gets pedestrianised every weekend so that the shoppers can roam free. We roamed into the Apple store where Simon bought an i-pod shuffle to enable him to listen to Japanese language teaching tapes on his commute to and from work. Don’t get too excited about electronics though – the current exchange rate means that all Apple products are roughly the same price as in the UK, while Japanese products actually seem more expensive. We will, of course, be doing more research into this because I think I’d like an electronic dog and a cleaning robot among other things…
One of the more amusing moments was when we accidentally strayed into the adult section of a DVD shop in Akihabara. We’ve been looking for a copy of Lost in Translation since we’ve been here and found a shop selling DVDs so we thought we’d check it out. The ground floor yielded nothing, so we went upstairs and found ourselves in the porn section. As well as the ‘regular’ blue movies, there were also shelves and shelves full of anime (the moving version of manga) porn. Shops like these are definitely worth a quick look, even if only to marvel at the sheer number of furtive-looking middle-aged men standing around rocking with their hands in their pockets. We didn’t hang around for too long.
Here are some photos of the things we saw on Sunday (not including the anime porn!)
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| A small taster of Akihabara Electric City |
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| Not really sure why this car has ears but I think it's cool |
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| Beauty display in the middle of the street. We watched for a while and I learned how to massage my face properly |
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| Amazing building clad entirely in glass bricks |
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| Pedestrianised Chuō-Dōri where shoppers take over! |
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| National Diet Building. Yes I had to stand in the middle of the road to take this picture, proper tourist-style! |
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| Cool train lines and bridges criss-crossing over the river. The architecture and engineering in Tokyo is really something else. |
Until the next time…
WOW WOW WOW....congrats on your beautiful apartment! be there to visit in Jan!!! xx
ReplyDeleteps. love the ear car!
ReplyDeleteThat is such a swanky apartment! Good result, guys! Love the glass bricks building, and still intrigued by the lack of standardisation in toilet controls. I'm beginning to see they're treated like an appliance, so now I want to know if you buy them in plumbing shops, next to the baths, or in electronic shops, next to the washing machines. (I may have given this too much thought already, but it's my distant anthropology training fighting its way out...)
ReplyDelete