Comiket & Tokyo Tower

Yesterday was the last day of Comiket, the largest comic convention in the world. Since it was only about an hour away from my apartment, I decided to go. Nicola (German/Bulgarian) came with me also. Afterwards we planned on meeting up with Steve, Levi, and Levi's friend to go to Tokyo Tower.

Anyways, waking up, leaving Youth Heim at about 9am we got to Tokyo Big Sight Convention Center in Odaiba at around 11am.

It was really fun. There were tons of people there so it was more or less like bumper cars inside. There were not as many gaijin as I thought there would be, and the ones that were there seemed to all be the "dumb tourist gaijin" that I mentioned earlier. There were a few cool foreigners though. It was pretty cool though, there were a few main halls with thousands of thousands of people in them. Thousands of tables were set up in the hall and tons of doujin authors would be selling their latest creations. The good majority of the comics were ero/hentai/echii, but it was still cool. You would just go up to an author's table, pick up the book they are selling, flip through it, and then buy it if you wanted. The material ranged from 100 yen to 1500yen depending on quality. I'm really not too much of an otaku, but it was still fun to go through and see it from a tourist standpoint.


After a quick snack we met up with Steve over in Shinjuku. Levi needed to pick up an adapter for his laptop so we headed to Akihabara. Levi was wandering around everywhere with his friend, and it seemed like a hopeless search (which in the end it was), so Steve, Nicola, and I decided to go get a beer at a local pub.


After that fiasco, we went over to the Tokyo Oedo Subway line to Akabanebashi station. From the subway station we walked about five minutes over to Tokyo Tower. Just viewing it from the outside it was amazing. The lighting was brilliant, it was huge (bigger than the Eifel Tower according to Steve), and overall very majestic. We made our way to the base of the tower. On the base there were a ton of shops/restaurants, and museums. We bought our ticket and headed up to the main observatory. The view was very stunning. Pictures don't do it justice. You could see why everyone raves about the night view in Tokyo.

My camera is good for taking night shots, but my hands are very shaky, so I couldn't set the exposure time too high. Maybe I will get one of those mini tripods....

Overall it was a very nice experience. There were many different people at the tower. Foreigners, Japanese, a lot of little kids, and many couples. Afterwards we just headed to a bar in Shinjuku and got all-you-can drink for a couple hours. We took one of the last trains home and I got back to Youth Heim at around 1am.