Pilgrimage to Akihabara (Electric Town) and My New Purple Sony Camera

A visit to Tokyo is never complete with a pilgrimage to Akihabara. The signs in the metro call it Electric Town. Akihabara is several square blocks of multi-story stores and buildings that sell electronics parts, phones, cameras, small appliances, games, and computers.

Maki loves coming here because there's this crazy alley filled with little shops that sells electronics parts and kits. He can find obscure cables and connectors, ham radio parts, kits he makes with CJ and his buddy Crawford, yada, yada.

I love Akihabara because here you can find cameras, video cameras and phones in all makes, models and colors. When we visited Akihabara back in 2000 (right after we got married), I picked up a purple Walkman. Sure enough, on this trip, I picked up a purple Sony point and shoot camera.

Akihabara is also full of buildings with nothing but video game consoles and arcade games across many floors. CJ went into one building with Alex. If it weren't for the smoke in the building, I think I would have lost them forever.

Here's a few of one street. Note the tall SEGA building where every floor had terminals for playing games. Crazy!

There's a lot of food in Akihabara as well.

No idea what this game was or how it worked. There was a circular screen and this guy would touch the screen as these blocks would flash on. The game was very fast-paced and he seemed to be getting perfect scores. He was moving around a lot to keep up with the game and he was wearing these gloves that I assume are the special touch screen gloves.

Check out these colorful Sony cameras. I got the purple one!

 More colorful cameras. Why don't they sell these in the US?

 Pink and gold cameras!

 Blue and red cameras!