Today was a well needed relaxing day. We traveled by Shinkansen, or Japan’s Bullet Train, to Atami. A fishing village where the Ashihara’s have a small apartment.
The Bullet Train was amazing. I’m jealous the US doesn’t have one. The trip to Atami, on a normal train would take over 2 hours, on the Bullet Train?? 45 MINUTES! It was great! Ichiro took video of the train. Soon on his site, you will be able to see how fast it is.
Atami was great. We had a wonderful lunch at a small restaurant and headed up the crazy streets to the apartment. The streets were very similar to Lombard St in San Fran, however traffic was two way and you drove on the left hand side of the street, oh yeah FULL SIZE buses also drove up and down the mountain road!
Great little shopping area in Atami.
Once at the apartment we were able to relax and enjoy the view of the ocean.
Check out who made the center of the wall!
How’s that for an ocean view!!!
We were back in Tokyo around 7pm and Ichiro and I were trying to decide what to do. We headed out to the department store, which just happened to be closed. So we ended up in the Pachinko Parlor.
Pachinko is a gaming device used for amusement and prizes and is a cross between the pinball machine and a video slot machine. We saw several of them in Akahabara but had no idea how it worked. Apparently gambling is not allowed in Japan, so by Japanese law, cash cannot be paid out. We did, however read on a few websites that there is usually a small exchange center located nearby where players can exchange tokens for cash.
We watched a few people play and finally asked if one of the workers could help us. We found one guy that spoke some broken English and he TRIED to explain what to do. We really had NO idea what we were doing and ended up just pressing buttons. All of a sudden the machine was going crazy and we had TONS of balls coming out. We fill tray after tray and in the end had 9 trays filled with balls!!! People couldn’t believe it. This one guy near me kept leaning over to see what I was doing. I just laughed and shrugged my shoulder. I honestly had no idea what I was doing!
So we played for about an hour, and decided we would cash out to see what 9 trays of balls is worth. Our helper “counted” our trays of balls and took us over to the prize counter. There we were asked what prizes we wanted. She asked chocolate, alcohol or cigarettes. Ichiro was like “Cash??” and our friend said we had to pick one of them first. We picked the chocolate and the lady behind the counter gave us a bag filled with 4 boxes of chocolate. Then she gave us some tokens. Our friend then took us outside, and across the parking lot to this little shack. There we gave a different lady our tokens and she gave us 33000 yen… That’s about $330!!!!! What an exciting night! YEAH PACHINKO!
Like Foxwoods we couldn’t take pictures, however I found this one on-line. It is honestly just rows and rows of these machines (and VERY loud)!
There’s a picture of the parlor from our hotel room!
Somehow we ended up with this in our pocket;)
In no way did we “win”… wink wink. lol