Round One: Ready? GO!

August 6: Jiuna!!!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of natto and showered before getting my room ready to be left alone for a while (taking out garbage, drawing blinds, etc.).  I got out of the dorm at around the time I wanted to, and stopped at Pain de Mie to pick up a melon pan to give to Jiuna on her arrival.  I got one for myself and ate it, so that I could avoid giving it to her if it gave me acid stomach by the time she landed haha.

I took the Keikyu line to Shinagawa, and then the Yamanote to Ueno, where I took the Keisei line to Narita.  It all went quite smoothly, as I had google-mapped it beforehand, and knew which exits to take.  I arrived at the arrival gates about 45 minutes before her plane was scheduled to land, which gave me time to pick up some blueberry yogurt and a red bean pastry for a pseudo-lunch.

Jiuna's plane arrived slightly ahead of time, and it took about half an hour for her to get off the plane and through customs I think.  I met her right at the arrival gate, and we hugged and I gave her her melon pan and some pocky.  We took the Keisei Skyliner back to Ueno (we're just high-rollers like that) and checked into our hotel.  After checking in and getting settled, we headed straight for Akiba and grabbed an early dinner at Tenya.  Today we mostly wandered Akiba at Jiuna's direction.  Apparently a lot of stuff has changed since she was here.  Many of her favourite bookstores are in newer, swankier buildings or in different locations entirely.  I took her to the Project Diva machines at CLUB SEGA 2, because I thought there might be a huge crowd for the new song release that happened on the 4th, but it looked quite tame at first sight.  The reason for the lack of a lineup, however, was that there was some sort of tournament going on!  It wasn't really all that captivating though.  I think I'll stick to Evo and StarCraft for my ESPORTS needs.  There were some cosplayers though, and the people in attendance were making a lot of cheerful noise, which is always cool to see.  We also bought our Izu Q-kippu (some kind of touring ticket deal) at Akihabara JR Station, although we actually use a different line to get to Akiba from our hotel.

Jiuna started to crash at about 9 and I was getting quite tired too, so we headed back to our hotel to prepare for tomorrow.  We will be getting up decently early to check out and will make our way to Izu to start our grand adventure!  I'm not sure what our Internet arrangements will be like when we're there, so don't get worried if I miss a day of blogging (for the first time!).  Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, so that I'm able to get up with Jiuna, whose body clock is on quite a different time than local, and will probably be raring to go at some ungodly hour in the morning. >_<

Night!