Tokyo Trip: Comiket

Day 2

(Austin)

    After going to sleep quite early the previous night we awoke early with lots of energy (rare for me), ready to go. Today we were going to Comiket!

    We left the capsule hotel and walked to a near by Yoshinoya. Yoshinoya is a restaurant that specializes in Gyudon. Gyudon (Gi-yew-don) quite literally means "beef bowl". Gyudon is a bowl of white rice topped with beef and cooked onions. It also is usually flavored with a bit of soy sauce or other sauces depending on the restaurant.

A picture of Gyudon from Yoshinoya

    However we didn't get Gyudon. Instead we had Butadon (boo-ta-don). Butadon means "pig bowl" and quite similar to Gyuodon, but it uses pork instead. It also has stronger tasting sauces to help bring out the flavor of the meat at the expensive of making the rice less sticky (harder to pick up with chopsticks). However, it is extremely delicious.

    After our "breakfast" we went to a convenience store, bought bento (premade lunch) for later, and headed towards the train station. The train tracks in Tokyo are packed together tightly and a station can service many different lines at the same time. The station we went to services 6 different lines (12 tracks). We took the train to another station where we switched to a monorail. The monorail traveled over Tokyo bay towards Tokyo Big Site, the location that Comiket is held.

    Tokyo Big Site is famous for its rather odd appearance of 4 upside-down pyramids at the entrance.  It also is world renown for the large conventions that it holds, one of the most famous being Comiket.  Comiket is the largest convention for Doujinshi (doe-jin-she) which is fan made content relating to Anime and Manga. When we went they had a total attendance of ~600,000 people. This convention is NOT for people who are bad with crowds. Luckily, Elijah and I have both been to conventions before so we didn't have much of a problem.

    We walked the convention floor for hours looking at random stuff and buying stuff. We also collected a lot of free stuff.  "best part" - Elijah, 2016.  Almost everything we knew was extremely expensive but it was a lot of fun to look at. I bought a few badges and also a special limited time mug. Elijah also bought a small cloth case that he uses for his PS Vita. 

    Around 5 we left because Comiket was closing for the day. We sat down on benches right outside of the Tokyo Big Site building and ate the bentos that we bought earlier that morning. We hadn't eaten lunch so it was really nice to finally be able to eat something. We should've ate them earlier..

    We were exhausted at this point so we headed back to the hotel...

... and promptly fell asleep around 7:30.