Lake Town

Here's Koshigaya's Aeon Lake Town. Japan's biggest shopping center just won't fit in cramped-ass Tokyo, so it's way out here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, one hour away from the city. It's not even in the Tokyo prefecture. Hard to miss it, though. The place is 200,000 square meters large  and its own train station.
Speaking only in numbers, Lake Town houses 200 different stores and is the 28th biggest shopping center in the world. It's not exactly the closest to the top, but hell if it isn't big.

Accompanying me are Ken, Erika, and her daughter Maxine. Also, there's Andrew! He's Erika's 15 year old brother. For the sake of introductions, if someone took baby Maxine, made her ten times bigger and gave her the gift of speech, then the resulting life form would probably be a lot like Andrew.
 Here's a picture with both Andrew and Erika looking particularly like goblins. Maybe it runs in the family?

Chilling in a home hardware store.

Back to Koshigaya Lake Town, the mall is split into four sections: Water, Forest, Wind and the Outlet section, which is completely outdoors. The three hours we spent there took us through a little less than half of the place. Today being a national holiday, though, it was impossible to buy anything: lines stretched out even out of the doors of certain stores. As much as I also would've loved to buy some furnishing for my crib, the distance home was also a cumbersome obstacle. 

My highlight? Maybe just watching Maxine play around with the other kids in this lego-themed shop. The name of the shop itself, "clickbrick" looked alarmingly like "dickbrick" due to the poor choice of font for the shop's logo. But this is Japan, so who cares! Hurrah!
 But yeah, in conclusion, Laketown is like a big dog. It's big.