Is it really only the end of day 2?

Jet lag or illness or selves-as-usual keeps us in the apartment till noon. We are half-timing Tokyo.

Still fighting off something. Feel ill, so eat; eat, feel ill again. Coffee temporarily stays the beasties, whatever they are. Still, there's nothing to kill the feeling of being on vacation like having to search for a provisional resting spot to wait out the nausea amid the omnistimuli of a Tokyo electronics store.

So, Akihabara it is, because Andrew came here for that and for the shinkansen above all.

The market part of the area seems to have been reduced to a small corridor beneath the tracks. Bright, loud, cartoonish, and lewd stores consume the rest of the area. Girls in maid outfits, for whatever reason of sameness, and gaijin and nerdy Japanese men run amok. We stopped by the duty-free store and were disappointed to find it to be like every other place. And we cruised the Japanese domestic goods and wished to have those things that would work with our electrical currents.

If there is one thing I wanted to buy on this trip it was a Japanese cell phone. They're so damn usable. Designed for one-handed use and still large and sturdy enough to be a thing you want to look at for hours and also to drop haphazardly into your bag the rest of the time. They come in all imaginable colors, including the entire pantone palette. Buying one is like picking the color of the paint on a car, and the possibilities are endless. There's nothing like the U.S. cell phone market to show how limited the U.S. market as a whole has become.

Anyway, all the phones are G2 without compatibility with GSM.

Later we found the components market and loved every tiny booth of it, with I-made-your-eyes guys tucked into cubbies behind an audience of LEDs or conductors. The men stared into laptop screens, some laptops more than a decade old, never looking up to see us browsing their back-lit switches and on/off buttons. Andrew knew what every little thing was—I mean every little thing. If he lived here, he would spend his weekends in the market buying little things to make into machines.

For lunch we ate at Kanda Yabu Soba just across the river from Akihabara. I love soba and good soba is hard to find stateside. The woman processing the orders there called them out in a singsong voice that sounded like temple bells.

I think we planned to return to the apartment to rest before going out again, but when we returned we found that the water was shut off. We called the owner and he came quickly, which was reassuring. He learned that the water pump for the building failed and that it would be repaired quickly, which it was. He looked relieved that the problem wasn't his, and he took us to dinner at a nearby Italian place. The only other diners were hipster Japanese guys—big burly dudes, not waify du jour—who had parked their fixies out front. The dinner was kind of awkward, but Shoji seemed sincere enough, even if it was just a gesture. I am glad he offered us dinner and the later gift of wine and some funky corned beef. Some reparations are due for the bullshit we didn't order with this accommodation.