Temple visit and more Akihabara exploration

Today Steve and I got up and ate at McDonald's yet again. Can't get enough of that homey goodness of hotcakes. Soon after we took the train at Akihabara a few stations down to Asakusa where I visited my first Buddhist temple. There were lots of foreigners around, myself included, but it was a hot spot for the Japanese people as well.

Steve and me wandered around the area of the temple for a while and then we hopped a train back to the hostel to rest our legs for a while and I took a nap. We went back to Akihabara and attempted to play Pachinko. Think Plinco from Price is Right but way smaller, and you insert a 1000 yen bill ($10) and you get about 150 pachinko balls and you can only control at the speed at which the balls fall down hitting pins and bouncing around and the goal is to get it in this very small hole. Once a ball makes it in the hole the machine turns into a slot machine and you end up getting more balls. Gambling is illegal in Japan so you have to trade in any balls you have left over for prizes, however there is an excepted loophole where you take a special voucher after trading in your balls and you take said voucher to an exchange station generally across the street or in the alley (I've yet to experience this) and you give them the voucher and they give you cash back. Of course being the first time Steve or me every played we lost 10 dollars in probably less than 2 min, so we decided to stop there. It Steve's first experience gambling and he wasn't happy, I've lost far more money than that gambling on slots, but I'm glad we stopped at 10 bucks.


After losing our money at pachinko we wandered around Akihabara even more and I found a cheap mic/headset to use with my PC because my mic doesn't seem to be working as well as it probably should. We then made our way back to the hostel, but stopping at yet another arcade on the way back where we saw some interesting games like Rambo, Aliens, and a Half Life 2 arcade game. I only played a Silent Hill gun shooting game as well as Aliens for a buck. We then got some pizza from dominoes, and we ended up getting 20% off since it was at night and take out. Meaning we ended up paying like 13 bucks for a pretty small pizza. So now we're just chilling out in the hostel room and I'm gonna log off for the night. I'm going to start using a slideshow app for big trips like this to get a lot of pics in one place, hope those of you tuning in enjoy!