Nakano report, Canadian Embassy.

I had some Extra time after going to renew my passport today and went to Nakano, Spoke to a cute nekomimi maid for an hour, in Japanese, not sure how I accomplished that, and then raided Nakano Broadway.

Interestingly, there's a new Mandarake shop.
It's not really interesting though, but the entrance looks super cool.

It's kind of like the 4th floor old toy museum, this one is kind of a museum for old plastic model kit.

I found a goldmine of nice ToAru stuff in one of the Mandarake, and that super cute Asuka's figure.
I haven't bought an Evangelion figure in a long time, but that one was too cute. And cheap...
Now I'll have to hunt down the Rei that goes with it.

And I'm adding 1 more Misaka Imouto to my strap/keychain collection.

I posted the collection yesterday on G+ but I'll post it here as well.

While I'm actually writing something on my blog, I guess I could talk about the Canadian embassy in Japan, since I had to go there today to renew my passport.
It's the second embassy I go to in my life, the first one being the Japanese embassy in Montreal.
The Canadian one in Tokyo is super huge compared to that little room in the middle of a big complex building in Montreal.
The Canadian Embassy is called Place Canada, and is a super huge building. I didn't visit any of it though, just went straight to the consulate place. Where I was told, I can only submit passport renewals in the mornings...
That's super stupid, fortunately, the girl let me submit it anyway, so all was fine in the end.
Passport renewal is super easy, hand the papers, pay, and wait 2 weeks (or so), no real hassle so that was fine.

Tachikawa X Anime

Little history about Tachikawa before I begin this post. Tachikawa is about 45m~1h from Tokyo, west of Nakano. The IKEA is there, and more importantly, some anime stuff Happen there. Some scene in the ToAru series happen there (actually I'm curious to see if the sister's arc happens there both in Index and Railgun or if they changed the location to look like Tachikawa only in Railgun...), more recently, Gatchaman Crowds and Sekai Seifuku: Bouryaku no Zvezda happen there.

Today (and yesterday) in Tachikawa, a matsuri was held. It's a pretty normal matsuri, actually not so interesting compared top other Japanese matsuri I've been, maybe it was because of the temperature, I don't know...

It's a matsuri so I had to buy Yakisoba!

 

Anyway, in parallel to this matsuri, a anime rally was organized, where you have to walk all around town to get cards from participating shops, if you get 7 or more, you get a special 2015 Railgun Calendar.

This was the starting point:

So I did it, and I also collected some of the special goods sold there along the way. It was a long walk, took me about 3 hours (you need only 7 cards, but I went and got all 10 of them, and 2 shops also gave me last year's card so I got 12 in the end), unfortunately, once you go a little farther away from the station, Tachikawa isn't really interesting. So it wasn't really that nice.
And the calendar they give as prize is ... meh
I don't regret doing it, spoke with some people, especially the people at the Tea house (one of the participating shops) were really nice.
Here's some pictures of some of the shops:

The tea house

Tachikawa also has some really nice Index Vending Machines all around town, I found 4 of them, but unfortunately, not the Imouto one :( (I wasn't specifically looking for them so I didn't check their location on the internet, but it's available on Tachikawa's website)
The 4 I saw, and the special drink they offer:

And this is today's total loot:

This was the website for the event: http://www.tbt.gr.jp/tachikawa_anime/rakuichi2014autumn/
if you want to see the picture album from today it's here, but most pictures are already posted in this post.