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So last night, the other K College student who is in Tokyo, our friend visiting from Kyoto, and I went out for to see The Hobbit last night. Beforehand though, they wanted to go to a maid cafe (a cafe where you are served by cute women dressed in maid outfits, it's a fairly popular thing in Japan, sadly); not exactly my cup of tea, but they seemed excited for it, and I'm sure it's a Japanese experience to be had. We headed off to Akihabara (秋葉原), basically the managa/anime/video-games geek enclave of Tokyo, and therefore where most such cafes are to be found. On the way we realized one problem that would to dominate the hunt for dinner that evening though: Because of the new year holiday (which is still going on), all of the post offices are closed until the 4th. Not a big deal right? Well, the only ATMs that consistently accept debit cards from foreign banks are inside post offices...and not having anticipated this, none of us was carrying much money.
However, 7/11 ATMs will often take American cards, so after spending about 15 minutes hunting for a 7/11, we found one and thought we were in the clear. Low and behold, that for some reason this 7/11 wasn't feeling particularly patriotic, and left us with the same small sum of cash that we had before.
But that's not so bad right? We'd just get a cheaper dinner. Well.....thing is we didn't know if the movie theater would take credit cards (because a lot of places don't), So for the safety of the movie we had to eat somewhere that would take credit cards. Turns out that maid cafes don't accept credit cards (no surprise there), so we just decided "You know what, let's just go to McDonalds": it's cheap, and it's almost got to accept credit cards. Almost. Apparently it doesn't.
There was however, one place that I knew, without fail, was open every hour, of every day and did accept credit cards: the convenience store (called a conbini [コンビニ] for short in Japan). So what had originally been plans for a dinner filled with cute women resulted in us three guys standing on the street eating rice balls.
Sometimes, life just happens.
