The first point of order is that I remembered today that I had not redeemed my stash of Scene+ points (the Scotiabank/Safeway rewards program) toward my travel yet. This rewards program lets me apply the best rate that they have (100 points = $1 CAD) toward any purchase that I make in the travel category specifically up to one year after I make the actual purchase, though there is a 5,000 point minimum redemption and each purchase can only be redeemed against once. So I don’t have to have points to cover the entire purchase, but I can’t partially claim against it and then come back later on and try to claim against the remainder.

All that was fine for me though. It’s the best redemption, as I noted, and is better than their “100 points = $1 CAD” redemption against groceries becuause I don’t then gain the points that I would have gotten from the discounted portion of the purchase, which, with my card, gives me something like 3 points per dollar spent or something. I’m not even actually convinced that I get points from a partially redeemed grocery purchase, either.

Anyway, I had collected 32,432 points in my Scene+ account over the course of the last year. So I applied that against my plane tickets and got $324.32 back. That felt good. Or it will feel good in 2-3 days when it actually clears and I get my reward.

I had seen a store named Sukiya yesterday on Higashi-Jujo Shopping Street advertising breakfast, so I went back there today. As I understand it, Sukiya is a widespread fast food franchise specializing in cheap Japanese beef bowls and rice set meals. The food was fairly good, very cheap, and quite fast, though I only saw one woman working in the staff area and wasn’t sure how she dealt with both cooking the orders and cleaning and washing up used bowls and trays. Maybe there was someone else hidden in the back. Anyway, I ordered the sausage rice set, and saw an option to add natto as well, and I did so, for a total of 420 + 70 = 490 yen. The natto in the picture is in the styrofoam box under the bowl in the bottom right.

My plan this day was to meet Quintopia later in the evening at Matsuya Ginza for an evening Bocchi the Rock! event, so I didn’t want to do anything too strenuous in the morning or early afternoon. I was a little behind on work and the blog since I fall asleep so fast in the evenings, so I headed back toward my lodging after breakfast, planning to spend some time catching up on all of those instead. I also bought a towel, since apparently my apartment in Chiba, booked from when I return from Osaka, will not provide one, and I received a message noting that I should bring a towel along with me. It can line the bottom of my suitcase while not in use. I might end up changing that booking if I find a decent apartment for as cheap though.

Lunch was at a Hong Kong restaurant, and consisted of vegetable noodle soup with half-fried rice. Half-fried rice as the name of a cooking style/dish name always sounds very weird to me.

I didn’t find it bad, but neither did I find it particularly good. After lunch, I took the train over to Akihabara, again, because that was about three stations over from Ginza, where I was going to meet Quintopia, and I still had a couple of hours to kill before we met. He had touched down and was making his way to his hotel as I wandered in and out of some more second-hand stores and bought a couple of rarer CDs from a series that I like, while chatting to him over Discord. It wasn’t raining this time, so the rain to no-rain score is now 4.5 to 2.5. Amazing.

Because Ginza was about three stations away, and I had about three hours to go, I decided for a third day in a row to take a 45+ minute walk across the city to view the sights, feel the wind, and hurt the shoulders. I ran into some interesting shops along the way, the first one being this one that sold onion-shaped items, slime plushies from Dragon Quest, a bunch of general gifts, and a plushie called Nanoha, the mascot character of Sumoto City, in Hyogo Prefecture, which is a city way to the west. It’s even a little west of Osaka, where I am headed to in a few days. I’m guessing the general gifts in the store were Sumoto-related too, since the name of the shop was Sumotokan (Sumoto Shop), but it’s kind of weird that they had a shop where I found it, far away from touristy areas.

Sadly, they didn’t sell any hyper-local CDs that I could buy, but they had Nanoha plushies, so I picked up one.

According to a Google Translate of the note, Nanoha is an elf and represents nanohana, the city’s official flower. It also goes towards supporting children in a small city whose population is apparently slowly dwindling, so that’s nice.

Not far along, I found another interesting shop. This was a pop-up shop dedicated to sumo wrestling.

It uh, wasn’t my thing, but I went in and had a look around anyway. No special CDs were to be found. Not that I know what a sumo-specific CD could possibly be about (I don’t count or care about Bluray or DVD disks) but that’s part of the fun.

Anyway, 45+ minutes later, I reached Matsuya Ginza with about two hours to spare before our meeting and event. I took the time to recce the building, going up to the 8th floor to see the event area, up to the 9th floor to look at the rooftop terrace and overpriced vending machines and a little shrine there, and then down to the basement level to look at the overpriced bento boxes and gift booths there. I never knew the term for them, but Quintopia taught me that they are called depachika. Department basements. I ate at the one at Kyoto Station several times during my first trip to Kyoto because Akira, who was my Airbnb host at that point, was a big proponent of that, but I’ve also seen similar things at other posh department stores in Japan and even Singapore before.

They’re generally pricey though, and the one in Matsuya Ginza was definitely not worth it to me, so I went to scout around the area instead, looking at a bunch of food stores near Yurakucho Station, which was about three streets away and a lot cheaper. I found a seedy-looking tunnel under some train tracks leading to a couple bars or restaurants that were hidden away from society, and decided that that wasn’t a good path to go down. (I did go down it though, and back, but everytime a train ran by overhead the entire area shook.)

Eventually Quintopia came by and we met back at Matsuya Ginza, exchanged niceties and money (as I owed him some for tickets), and went off to get a snack from a nearby bakery. We then headed back to the venue to line up. There were 10 minute timeslots starting every 20 minutes, so like 6:00-6:10, 6:20-6:30, and 6:40-6:50, for  example, Each ticket also came with a specific number in the queue in our assigned timeslot for us to stand, so it wasn’t a first-come-first-serve sort of thing, and people were let in in groups of 5 at a time to view the Bocchi the Rock! exhibition that we had come to see.

Quintopia had somehow managed to get tickets #1 and #2 for the 6:00 pm timeslot, so we were right in front. We were there right as the timeslot opened, and it looked like it was just us for a minute or so, but suddenly a hoard of locals swooped in and the queue filled up behind us. At the end of the waiting time period, so 6:10 for our time slot, they started to let us in in aforementioned groups of five. Some pictures from the exhibit follow.