Reid Main

Because it was Elsie's birthday we had to sleep late into the morning. We barely managed to drag our butts out of bed and to a McDonald's for noon. This was our first time trying Japanese McDonald's and it was pretty good. Definitely felt like a better cut of beef and Elsie even got the teriyaki burger that she described as being "delicious" which is an adjective I would never expect someone to use for McDonald's food.

After lunch we jumped straight into shopping mode and started trolling Akihabara for all the SNES games that we wanted. Our Airbnb host pointed us to a nice article detailing the best retro game stores in the area and we proceeded to hit up every one of them. Based on how much we purchased I would say Super Potato and Retro Game Camp were the biggest winners for us but Elsie cashed in big at Mandarake Complex when she found a boxed copy of Mother 2. We bought Shadowrun, Bahamut Lagoon, Tactics Ogre, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Super Mario All-Stars, Dragon Quest III, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario RPG, Marvelous, Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Duel. If you are wondering on how we plan on playing all of these Japanese games, no we didn't buy a Super Famicom. We instead preordered Analogue's Super Nt which will allow us to play both Super NES and Super Famicom games in beautiful 1080p. Sure it doesn't launch until February but I think we can wait a few more months to play these games.

We were feeling pretty pooped after a couple of hours of shopping that we headed back to the Airbnb to drop off all our purchases and rest before it was time to leave for our evening activities. Since it was Elsie's birthday of course we had to go to some cute animal cafe and she managed to find Harry's Hedgehog Cafe. Nestled in a little back alley of Roppongi, up a small flight of stairs was a tiny cafe with eight or so seats and four aquariums housing the hedgehogs that were to be played with. I managed to shoot this cute video of Elsie holding a sleeping hedgehog and she managed to take this picture of me getting bit by one. I swear I wasn't doing anything to it. My hands were perfectly still when he decided to check if my finger was edible. Spoiler alert: it was. After we fed them some mealworms our hour was up and we moved onto dinner.

Through OpenTable Elsie had found Kobe Beef Kaiseki 511 which served a fixed price, eight course kobe beef meal that we could just not resist. Every course of the meal incorporated kobe beef in some manner from ground kobe stuffed in a shiitake mushroom to kobe sushi to the kobe sirloin steak that was absolutely to die for. Seriously I think Elsie contemplated killing me so she could get my portion. Undoubtably one of the greatest meals we've had in Tokyo and to boot we got a little gift bag when we left that contained some kobe beef flavored ramen broth.

Oh one thing worth mentioning is that at this restaurant we had the worst experience with foreign tourists yet. A couple from San Francisco, one a civil engineer the other a tech lawyer (I know this because of how loud they talked), struck up a conversation with another couple that was seated next to them (I only picked out of this couple that the woman was a yoga instructor). They proceeded to have the loudest possible conversation they could have, basically screaming across their tables to talk to one another. Elsie and I were sat 30 feet away in a booth on a raised platform and we could hear them as if they were sitting next to us. They obviously hadn't read my article on etiquette or they would have thought to tone their voices down a bit especially since they are in Japan. Although one of these couples proudly proclaimed that they took at Uber to the restaurant because they couldn't understand the subway system so I'm not sure between the two of them they have enough IQ points to read my article. Something funny to note is that the second those couples finished eating the waiters rushed their cheques over to them where Elsie and I had to flag our waiter down and ask.

After stuffing our face with kobe beef for two hours we decided to head home and rest our weary heads. Tomorrow was our second to last full day in Tokyo and we still hadn't played a single arcade game which we planned to rectify.