Shopping successful

Today I was determined to actually buy things rather than leave them behind in the basket. I left the house at 1425 and caught the train to Ikebukuro station. I realised that I’d never actually walked around right above the station so I went upstairs to eat and realised that it was a massive department store (nothing out of the ordinary for station buildings in Tokyo) called Seibu.

In total I think I spent three hours eating and walking around inside Seibu, getting out of that maze at 1720.

I finally managed to buy my things at Bic Camera. The man who I’d talked to last night, remembered me and helped me out. Like at Don Quijote, staff at the checkout were Chinese too, which really made sense when you looked around and realised that most of the shoppers on the watch floor were Chinese tourists.

My cashier experience was actually pretty poor. One of my items had to be swapped out behind the counter for the real thing, but only on the cosmetics level five floors below. It’s obviously a hassle, but the lady blatantly acted unimpressed and inconvenienced. The total eventually came to less than 30000 JPY, which I didn’t expect because I’d actually been keeping track on my phone, so I ran downstairs to grab another puzzle, of which I’d already bought quite a few, but I didn’t mind since I didn’t really know how many to get in the first place. It turns out that they’d forgotten to scan the watch strap that I’d bought, since it was being changed on my watch at the time. Since she’d already processed the tax free transaction for everything else, she told me “no tax free”.

I was a little confused since I thought maybe she was saying that it wasn’t permitted since it was immediately changed onto my watch and therefore had been “consumed” in Japan. After standing my ground, she relented, which really annoyed me because it seemed to indicate that she really was just being lazy…

I spent a while in Coffee Valley learning Japanese and people watching. A few tables away from me was a German guy talking to a Japanese girl, having a conversation that switched between Japanese, English, and German! Neither were fluent in their non-native languages and they had to look things up, but they could clearly communicate. The Japanese girl didn’t seem to have much of a Japanese accent when speaking English and German, although the German guy’s accent was very heavy (and I loved it). I’ve never heard Japanese with a German accent before.

I got home at 2200 and tried to pack away some of my shopping, although I don’t think everything is going to end up fitting in my medium sized suitcase once I buy even more stuff.

My ankles were still a little sore from walking around all day yesterday in my sandals.

Waking hours

1210–2755