Once again, airbus 340 waiting for boarding....
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Ze last dayh!
Well, just got out from the shower, and since I don't really have anything planned for today aside from a club later tonight (Super-deluxe) I figured there's time for atleast one more entry.
Yesterday the weather turned out to be great, as in 20 degrees warm, sunshine, no clouds, the running around in tshirt kinda summer weather you'd expect in Finland in june... I checked out the places for shopping, shimokitazawa is really really great, has that small town kind of feel to it, without becoming like Daikayama with too clean streets and just big name brand stores -.- , not to mention Harajuku and the Omotesando area. The first two are also fairly empty of the masses, which someone from Finland or other countries with less population will enjoy. Walking along the main roads in Omotesando or Shibuya is insane in so many ways, there's just more people there than there are people living in Helsinki -.- ... Got a couple tshirts bought too, might head out for some more today, since I don't have any real plans as I said before. Yesterday also saw a visit to Ueno park to check out the Cherry Blossom viewing parties. And indeed there were companies and groups of people all around, sitting on their areas, getting drunk together... There was singing and dancing and all around happyness and merryness.. And I ate some of the best sushi in the world to top the day off, sweet indeed.
Now, today I'll prolly go reserve a ticket for the airport express, and prolly eat something. And umm that's about it, nothing more to do. I could obviously head down to Akihabara and spend some money there, doesn't seem to be much else left to do :/ If the weather's nice I'll prolly check out the parks again, every day now there should be more cherrys blooming so I'd hope I can get some nice shots of those.. Oh and I should prolly pack, or see if I have to go buy another bag...
Yesterday the weather turned out to be great, as in 20 degrees warm, sunshine, no clouds, the running around in tshirt kinda summer weather you'd expect in Finland in june... I checked out the places for shopping, shimokitazawa is really really great, has that small town kind of feel to it, without becoming like Daikayama with too clean streets and just big name brand stores -.- , not to mention Harajuku and the Omotesando area. The first two are also fairly empty of the masses, which someone from Finland or other countries with less population will enjoy. Walking along the main roads in Omotesando or Shibuya is insane in so many ways, there's just more people there than there are people living in Helsinki -.- ... Got a couple tshirts bought too, might head out for some more today, since I don't have any real plans as I said before. Yesterday also saw a visit to Ueno park to check out the Cherry Blossom viewing parties. And indeed there were companies and groups of people all around, sitting on their areas, getting drunk together... There was singing and dancing and all around happyness and merryness.. And I ate some of the best sushi in the world to top the day off, sweet indeed.
Now, today I'll prolly go reserve a ticket for the airport express, and prolly eat something. And umm that's about it, nothing more to do. I could obviously head down to Akihabara and spend some money there, doesn't seem to be much else left to do :/ If the weather's nice I'll prolly check out the parks again, every day now there should be more cherrys blooming so I'd hope I can get some nice shots of those.. Oh and I should prolly pack, or see if I have to go buy another bag...
Monday, March 26, 2007
I woke up this morning
And realised there was a strangely familiar looking cable attached to the side of the desk in my hotel room. Upon closer examination it indeed turned out to be the trusty old cat5e cable, provider of network access to millions of people worldwide. So no need to sit in the lobby for the wireless to post here, yay.
Yesterday was quite smooth. After arriving here and posting the last blog entry I took the Yamanote Line over to Harajuku. As always the shopping roads were totally full of teenagers, the bridge though only had a couple groups meeting, and there was the incredible tourist overflow, totally not cool. A short walk to the Yoyogi park entrance revealed that the rain had scared away the Rockabilly club, who weren't dancing but just stood there at their cars talking crap. The smart traveller at this point procedes to plan B, before yet another load of tourists arrives, and heads down towards the meiji dori, into the omotesando side of the railway tracks. From there I went down to Shibuya, again, took another train to get to Tokyo station and meet up with Nano, who in his usual fashion is about half an hour late -.-" . Would you want a guy to draw the plans for your house when he can't arrive on time even once... But seriously though, we checked out a bookstore for some classic in german, they didn't have it, took the Monorail to Odaiba and a museum that's been built from containers. It's all temporary and inside there was a photography exhibit. Aparently this was the third installation they've built, previously it was in NYC and then somewhere in California. Was pretty cool, nice pictures and if you really really liked them you could buy the book with large prints of them for a mere 850k yen, ... From odaiba to some skyscraper to check out cityscape at night. If you've seen bladerunner or watched Ghost in The Shell you sort of get what it looks like. And no, the damn thick windows mirrored the background light so effectively that camear shots of the place didn't really work out... Must see if I'll hit Mori tower once more before I leave to get a better view, assuming they don't have as much lights on there during the evenings..
As for today, Omotesando, Daikayama, Shimokitazawa are on the menu, which means tshirts, clothes and perhaps some other nice things will be bought... ttfn.
Yesterday was quite smooth. After arriving here and posting the last blog entry I took the Yamanote Line over to Harajuku. As always the shopping roads were totally full of teenagers, the bridge though only had a couple groups meeting, and there was the incredible tourist overflow, totally not cool. A short walk to the Yoyogi park entrance revealed that the rain had scared away the Rockabilly club, who weren't dancing but just stood there at their cars talking crap. The smart traveller at this point procedes to plan B, before yet another load of tourists arrives, and heads down towards the meiji dori, into the omotesando side of the railway tracks. From there I went down to Shibuya, again, took another train to get to Tokyo station and meet up with Nano, who in his usual fashion is about half an hour late -.-" . Would you want a guy to draw the plans for your house when he can't arrive on time even once... But seriously though, we checked out a bookstore for some classic in german, they didn't have it, took the Monorail to Odaiba and a museum that's been built from containers. It's all temporary and inside there was a photography exhibit. Aparently this was the third installation they've built, previously it was in NYC and then somewhere in California. Was pretty cool, nice pictures and if you really really liked them you could buy the book with large prints of them for a mere 850k yen, ... From odaiba to some skyscraper to check out cityscape at night. If you've seen bladerunner or watched Ghost in The Shell you sort of get what it looks like. And no, the damn thick windows mirrored the background light so effectively that camear shots of the place didn't really work out... Must see if I'll hit Mori tower once more before I leave to get a better view, assuming they don't have as much lights on there during the evenings..
As for today, Omotesando, Daikayama, Shimokitazawa are on the menu, which means tshirts, clothes and perhaps some other nice things will be bought... ttfn.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
And I'm back in Tokyo,
WLan at hotel lobby works, and for some reason I just had to post this -.- Actually I got the google earth links there on the side so I check in from here before I head out to an area what it'll be like, weather here sucks, rain, gonna head out to Harajuku anyways just to see if there's anything going on there or not. You people do whatever you do when you read my blog....
And I'm off to Tokyo again...
Last leg of the journey, well not counting flying back to Finland of course. 3 Nights in Tokyo in Ueno at a Hotel, means I can get to both the Keisei Skyliner for the airport ride, and onto Yamanote and both Hibiya and Ginza subway lines. Great positioning so to speak. Just 560 km or about 3 hours with the train till I'm there, assuming the Hikari Shinkansen has some free seats. Else I might have to chill for half or even a full hour at the Osaka Shinkansen station before I head out. I think I've praised shinkansen trains enough already but they indeed are really really great, I wish Finland had one, from like Kirkkonummi to Helsinki. Then I'd get to work in 10 minutes instead of the 40 that it now takes....
Ah yes, it's still raining here, although atleast yesterday weather forecast said we'd get sunshine and better weather till tuesday, so there's still hope for some nice shooting weather later today. Obviously since it's sunday I shall head out to Harajuku for a final look at the weirdest street corner and meeting place in Tokyo... After that the swedes should have arrived and we'll prolly have something planned with Nano and his mates from Stockholm. Should be cool. Alas, not much else to say, Osaka as a whole was somewhat of a dissapointment, could have moved a couple of the Osaka days to Hiroshima for example and it'd prolly been better, however Nails and some other people seem to dig Osaka so perhaps there's something that just didn't appeal to me that might appeal to other people. If you're bored and rich you could obviously head out here yourself and check it out, there's the IAAF World championships this year in Osaka for example, if you want somekind of excuse to coming here.
Ah yes, it's still raining here, although atleast yesterday weather forecast said we'd get sunshine and better weather till tuesday, so there's still hope for some nice shooting weather later today. Obviously since it's sunday I shall head out to Harajuku for a final look at the weirdest street corner and meeting place in Tokyo... After that the swedes should have arrived and we'll prolly have something planned with Nano and his mates from Stockholm. Should be cool. Alas, not much else to say, Osaka as a whole was somewhat of a dissapointment, could have moved a couple of the Osaka days to Hiroshima for example and it'd prolly been better, however Nails and some other people seem to dig Osaka so perhaps there's something that just didn't appeal to me that might appeal to other people. If you're bored and rich you could obviously head out here yourself and check it out, there's the IAAF World championships this year in Osaka for example, if you want somekind of excuse to coming here.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
worst day so far -.-
Well, it's like 2pm right now, and I'm sitting back at the hostel. Not cause I'm bored, or cause there wouldn't be anything else to do either, but because really everything today seems to go wrong... It starts with me missing the train to Kyoto. No big deal one would think, afterall there's a ton of trains going that way. So half an hour late I arrive there, and like the very moment I step out from the train station to the big map that greets you 2 things happen. First off I get surrounded by swedes who look at the map and start discussing where they'll go with their huge bags. Somehow they miss my very obvious fjällräven backpack and don't start talking to me so I make my escape from that group, and at that very moment the second thing happens, it starts raining. Just great, the only thing I have no alternative day for, which is my visit to Kyoto, and it rains. Yesterday when I visited the museum the weather was great, you could run around in a tshirt and enjoy weather akin to late spring or early summer in Finland. Now, when I'm not going inside but planning on doing lots of wandering to temples etc it starts raining.
While the rain builds up I check the situation, there's aparently no 100 yen shop at the station square, another thing going wrong there, so I end up in the closest am/pm, the obvious and very japanese umbrella with the clear plastic ends up costing 525 yen instead of the 100 yen it'd cost in the 100 yen shop. The sucking of the day continues after that too... I walk along the main road, and soon enough I'm at my first point of intrest, the main shrine of the shin buddhists in Japan, and incidentally one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. Is it there, is it gone? Who knows, aparently they are renovating it, so there's a huge white building that has been built around it. Go me... You can't really see anything, although the english 2 page booklet/brochure that they have in the information does show a picture of it. Atleast the smaller building next to the main house is open and not built under a humongous white superstructure... So I take out the camera only to realise that I've not charged the battery and it's almost empty. Mind you, the D40 is an awesome camera, the battery is the latest in technology and I can easily do 7-800 shots with one load, in fact it's so good you tend to forget to charge it now and then. After my 2 gigs of sumo shots there's not much you can do then when it's empty and I'm in a grey and miserable Kyoto where the rain just keeps getting worse.
Not giving up yet, I decide to atleast do some moer walking, obviously there must be other things to see which aren't under construction right now. So I go off to the next park, and indeed it's closed. The only thing that seems to be open is the insane amount of shops selling buddhist items like those prayerbead things and small shrines for the home, perhaps not the best shopping items for a tourist like me, athough it'd prolly make for a good story with customs... Anyways, there's not even a good food place around so I just gave up, and came back to the guesthouse. Since it's the last day in Osaka area anyways I figure I can do some uploading, editing, downloading and planning of the last couple days in Tokyo. Assuming the weather doesn't continue like this but improves I should be able to make a final assault on Harajuku tomorrow, after I've checked in at the new hotel in Tokyo. It seems some swedes who my mate down in Tokyo knows are also coming in from Stockholm tomorrow so chances are we'll be meeting up somewhere at some point, Tokyo ftw.
While the rain builds up I check the situation, there's aparently no 100 yen shop at the station square, another thing going wrong there, so I end up in the closest am/pm, the obvious and very japanese umbrella with the clear plastic ends up costing 525 yen instead of the 100 yen it'd cost in the 100 yen shop. The sucking of the day continues after that too... I walk along the main road, and soon enough I'm at my first point of intrest, the main shrine of the shin buddhists in Japan, and incidentally one of the largest wooden buildings in the world. Is it there, is it gone? Who knows, aparently they are renovating it, so there's a huge white building that has been built around it. Go me... You can't really see anything, although the english 2 page booklet/brochure that they have in the information does show a picture of it. Atleast the smaller building next to the main house is open and not built under a humongous white superstructure... So I take out the camera only to realise that I've not charged the battery and it's almost empty. Mind you, the D40 is an awesome camera, the battery is the latest in technology and I can easily do 7-800 shots with one load, in fact it's so good you tend to forget to charge it now and then. After my 2 gigs of sumo shots there's not much you can do then when it's empty and I'm in a grey and miserable Kyoto where the rain just keeps getting worse.
Not giving up yet, I decide to atleast do some moer walking, obviously there must be other things to see which aren't under construction right now. So I go off to the next park, and indeed it's closed. The only thing that seems to be open is the insane amount of shops selling buddhist items like those prayerbead things and small shrines for the home, perhaps not the best shopping items for a tourist like me, athough it'd prolly make for a good story with customs... Anyways, there's not even a good food place around so I just gave up, and came back to the guesthouse. Since it's the last day in Osaka area anyways I figure I can do some uploading, editing, downloading and planning of the last couple days in Tokyo. Assuming the weather doesn't continue like this but improves I should be able to make a final assault on Harajuku tomorrow, after I've checked in at the new hotel in Tokyo. It seems some swedes who my mate down in Tokyo knows are also coming in from Stockholm tomorrow so chances are we'll be meeting up somewhere at some point, Tokyo ftw.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Sumo and more
Ok, Sumos over, and the following day too. So I'll go through the two days at once, will give wizard something to read...
Sumo was great , 8 hours of battles, and especially the last two were great, when the arena was actually full and so forth. You can obviously check out the pictures on flickr, I shot a full memorycard so that's 615 pictures from the events. As you can see if you even skim through them it was first fairly empty, with mostly old people, tourists and housewives there. Battles were intresting though and you learned some finer details of the whole thing before you got through it. Once the main guys came , the best top 50 or so pros, the place filled up to the brim, was prolly sold out. And obviously the battles were great, most of them were fairly short but a few went on and on and the crowds obviously rewarded the best fights and best prefight ceremony show offs by the fighters.
Today I've done something totally different, I went to yet another museum. Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum. That's the Tezuka, the god of Manga, the guy who went from a looser with thick glasses as a kid, intrested in collecting and studying bugs, to becoming the god of manga, drawing over 150 thousand pages of manga, tons of series, lots of movies, and a host of legendary and unforgettable characters, some of whom have served as origins for disneys later work. Anyways, the museum obviously compares to the Ghibli museum, though while mainly about animation vs Tezuka being about the Manga first they do share the common grounds of being made mainly about one man/companys products and history which they both show in very different ways. That's where the problem lies though, animation offers alot more than simply manga do, Ghibli end up showing the history of the whole animation idea, along with obviously the thoughtprocess and work that goes into an animated feature by them, along with lots of original artwork and pieces from their movies. Tezuka on the other hand have 3 floors, although there's less space on them. There is a movie theater, then there's basically just lots of screens with the original artwork through time being shown, the bottom floor contains a computer system where you can try yourself at various parts of the animation process, from coloring to adding different effects or shots together to make a small clip. Quite fun for about 10 minutes. But that's about it, there's not much more after that.
Anyhow, apart from that I didn't really do much. There's the Osaka castle, which I was planning on visiting. It's the biggest tourist attraction in all of Japan, but sadly it's a rebuilt castle, this version being in concrete and from 1930 or something. There's even an elevator in there. Great for people in wheelchairs, I however have just visited Himeji, and the biggest and greatest of the remaining real castles in Japan so Osaka's fake one didn't seem intresting after all that, especially since I'd also seen the one in Hiroshima, which atleast can say it's been rebuilt cause someone dropped an atomic bomb on it.
Tomorrow I should head out to Kyoto, check out some more temples, get rid of all those 1 yen coins that aren't worth much but will be good to appease the gods, be it shinto or buddhists... And then it's off to Tokyo again, some final shopping and then home to that godforsaken hellhole in northern europe.
Sumo was great , 8 hours of battles, and especially the last two were great, when the arena was actually full and so forth. You can obviously check out the pictures on flickr, I shot a full memorycard so that's 615 pictures from the events. As you can see if you even skim through them it was first fairly empty, with mostly old people, tourists and housewives there. Battles were intresting though and you learned some finer details of the whole thing before you got through it. Once the main guys came , the best top 50 or so pros, the place filled up to the brim, was prolly sold out. And obviously the battles were great, most of them were fairly short but a few went on and on and the crowds obviously rewarded the best fights and best prefight ceremony show offs by the fighters.
Today I've done something totally different, I went to yet another museum. Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum. That's the Tezuka, the god of Manga, the guy who went from a looser with thick glasses as a kid, intrested in collecting and studying bugs, to becoming the god of manga, drawing over 150 thousand pages of manga, tons of series, lots of movies, and a host of legendary and unforgettable characters, some of whom have served as origins for disneys later work. Anyways, the museum obviously compares to the Ghibli museum, though while mainly about animation vs Tezuka being about the Manga first they do share the common grounds of being made mainly about one man/companys products and history which they both show in very different ways. That's where the problem lies though, animation offers alot more than simply manga do, Ghibli end up showing the history of the whole animation idea, along with obviously the thoughtprocess and work that goes into an animated feature by them, along with lots of original artwork and pieces from their movies. Tezuka on the other hand have 3 floors, although there's less space on them. There is a movie theater, then there's basically just lots of screens with the original artwork through time being shown, the bottom floor contains a computer system where you can try yourself at various parts of the animation process, from coloring to adding different effects or shots together to make a small clip. Quite fun for about 10 minutes. But that's about it, there's not much more after that.
Anyhow, apart from that I didn't really do much. There's the Osaka castle, which I was planning on visiting. It's the biggest tourist attraction in all of Japan, but sadly it's a rebuilt castle, this version being in concrete and from 1930 or something. There's even an elevator in there. Great for people in wheelchairs, I however have just visited Himeji, and the biggest and greatest of the remaining real castles in Japan so Osaka's fake one didn't seem intresting after all that, especially since I'd also seen the one in Hiroshima, which atleast can say it's been rebuilt cause someone dropped an atomic bomb on it.
Tomorrow I should head out to Kyoto, check out some more temples, get rid of all those 1 yen coins that aren't worth much but will be good to appease the gods, be it shinto or buddhists... And then it's off to Tokyo again, some final shopping and then home to that godforsaken hellhole in northern europe.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Himeji
Todays been a pretty great day. I woke up early, had a yogurt for breakfast, atleast I assume it was a yogurt. I couldn't actually read what it said but atleast it looked like it... Anyways, headed out to Nanba or Namba or how you spell it, an area of Osaka which seem to contain quite alot of things, there's partying and shopping to be done there if one so chooses. I was going to the Osaka municipal gymnasium though, site of one of the 6 mayor Sumo tournaments that are held each year. Each tournament takes 15 days, and for sumo people it's aparently quite a big event. Checking online I found out that the last day was pretty much sold out, however the 2 remaining days before that still had some of the cheap seats available, and that indeed you could buy those, however you can't buy them over the phone, unless you speak japanese ofc, then you prolly can reserve them. I don't speak the language though so that was not an option. Instead I headed out there, and behold, there were still places left, so tomorrow I shall watch big fat guys throw eachother around on a ring put ontop of sand or clay or something. Should be quite the event. AND if I get lucky once I get home I can watch eurosport when they send their hourlong feature from the tournament and I might see myself there watching the battles. Chances for that happening are obviously quite small, anyways that's tomorrow.
Todays main event was a daytrip with the Shinkansen, either to Kyoto or Himeji. Since I didn't really know which one to go to I picked the first line at the ticket counter at Shin Osaka, the Shinkansen station for Osaka, where JR east and JR west lines end. Since Kyoto lies on JR E and Himeji on JR W I ended up in JR Ws ticket reservation line and thus today I went to Himeji. Now, in Japan there are currently 12 big castles left. Not sure if thats including the ones that have been rebuilt in concrete or not, and of those Himeji is said to be the best, it's preserved, no Elevators and concrete in there like in Osaka Castle, and because of it's history it also never took part in any real wars, thus it's preserved in a very good way. And it's large, as in really large... They've taken away some of the moats, and basically the JR station, from where you walk about 10-15 minutes to the actual castle lies on the outermost moat of the old Castle and castle town. No clue how many people used to live there, but it's a large area that it used to cover. Now there's only really the main castle left, along with one of the larger moats, with parks and a small zoo on the inside, and some more parks just to the west of the castle. Sadly Sakura, cherryblossoms haven't properly appeared yet so there are a whole bunch of trees without leaves and anything out there, but I did find one tree blooming so I got atleast a few pictures of the castle with sakura in the pic. That's the way you should take pictures of it, and undoubtedly next week or so when Sakura are in full bloom there'll be about a million japanese guys and girls lined up with their supercamera equipment ready to take that picture...
Entrance to the whole place was 600 yen, which included the whole castle area including 2 buildings that you could enter. Of course you had to take your shoes off and carry them around in a bag, but that's part of the charm. On the other hand it meant you got a more natural feeling to the insides where all the floors are made of wood. And I realised it's not just now, they've always built in a way that looks great, is awesome in so many ways, and makes your ass freeze to death during nights unless you got air conditioning or fire or like some bedwarmers or something. The castle was equally cold as was the other building, and inside the castle they had even put just minimal lightning, instead relying on the rather small windows to bring in natural light. Prolly an aestetic idea, it looked natural and great, however parts of the place were really really dark and since there's beams on the floor and the room I can only imagine how some fat american tourists will hit their heads in there, or worse yet trip over some of the wooden frames that used to contain the movable wall parts.
I did eat some chicken bento there too, was a huge portion, and included all sorts of things to eat, including a small sausage, some veggies and an aparently cooked piece of a carrot. Oh and rice. Cause you gotta have rice. Rice is good, like really really good, atleast until you've eaten it for 3 weeks with every meal you run into. Then you start to realise how delicious a potato can be, or some fresh homemade mashed potatoes, with abit of herbs mixed in to get some extra taste, and a small piece of butter melting ontop....
Todays main event was a daytrip with the Shinkansen, either to Kyoto or Himeji. Since I didn't really know which one to go to I picked the first line at the ticket counter at Shin Osaka, the Shinkansen station for Osaka, where JR east and JR west lines end. Since Kyoto lies on JR E and Himeji on JR W I ended up in JR Ws ticket reservation line and thus today I went to Himeji. Now, in Japan there are currently 12 big castles left. Not sure if thats including the ones that have been rebuilt in concrete or not, and of those Himeji is said to be the best, it's preserved, no Elevators and concrete in there like in Osaka Castle, and because of it's history it also never took part in any real wars, thus it's preserved in a very good way. And it's large, as in really large... They've taken away some of the moats, and basically the JR station, from where you walk about 10-15 minutes to the actual castle lies on the outermost moat of the old Castle and castle town. No clue how many people used to live there, but it's a large area that it used to cover. Now there's only really the main castle left, along with one of the larger moats, with parks and a small zoo on the inside, and some more parks just to the west of the castle. Sadly Sakura, cherryblossoms haven't properly appeared yet so there are a whole bunch of trees without leaves and anything out there, but I did find one tree blooming so I got atleast a few pictures of the castle with sakura in the pic. That's the way you should take pictures of it, and undoubtedly next week or so when Sakura are in full bloom there'll be about a million japanese guys and girls lined up with their supercamera equipment ready to take that picture...
Entrance to the whole place was 600 yen, which included the whole castle area including 2 buildings that you could enter. Of course you had to take your shoes off and carry them around in a bag, but that's part of the charm. On the other hand it meant you got a more natural feeling to the insides where all the floors are made of wood. And I realised it's not just now, they've always built in a way that looks great, is awesome in so many ways, and makes your ass freeze to death during nights unless you got air conditioning or fire or like some bedwarmers or something. The castle was equally cold as was the other building, and inside the castle they had even put just minimal lightning, instead relying on the rather small windows to bring in natural light. Prolly an aestetic idea, it looked natural and great, however parts of the place were really really dark and since there's beams on the floor and the room I can only imagine how some fat american tourists will hit their heads in there, or worse yet trip over some of the wooden frames that used to contain the movable wall parts.
I did eat some chicken bento there too, was a huge portion, and included all sorts of things to eat, including a small sausage, some veggies and an aparently cooked piece of a carrot. Oh and rice. Cause you gotta have rice. Rice is good, like really really good, atleast until you've eaten it for 3 weeks with every meal you run into. Then you start to realise how delicious a potato can be, or some fresh homemade mashed potatoes, with abit of herbs mixed in to get some extra taste, and a small piece of butter melting ontop....
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
From the train
Ok, on the train to Shin osaka now. From 3 cities in 3 days we’ll switch to a rather more laid back 5 nights on Osaka, although I should visit Kyoto, and Himeji during those days. Daytrips are fun you see. Gotta take the Train for both of those, which thanks to the Rail Pass shouldn’t be a real problem, assuming I find the Osaka station JR place where you can activate your rail pass. It should be in the main station, but Osaka’s larger, like a small version of Tokyo. Atleast according to the books. They even bothered putting the subway map into the Rough Guide on Japan, which I guess says something about it. So much for the ”small” town feeling of Fukuoka or Hiroshima.
On the bright side that means nothing will ever be closed, and from what people say Osaka’s like the laid back version of Tokyo so it’ll be fun. That and they are like the inventors of Okonomiyaki, gods gift to hungry people. Except those in Afrika who don’t have electricity to warm the table plate.
Indeed it seems I got some time to muse about food here, since it’s still over an hour till we’re at shinOsaka. The best stuff I’ve eaten so far was prolly the okonomiyaki in Tokyo, in Hiroshima they have their own version of it where you don’t get to actually mix it yourself, but I had no time to test that one. I guess that’s one thing left for the next time I’m in Japan. Hiroshima seemed to have lots more to offer so that’ll have to be a stop next time round, preferably for like a week or something. There’s also the mountains which seem to be so much closer than when I was in Tokyo, but I’m again drifting from the important stuff, food.
Okonomiyaki is basically crepe dough that gets served to the table in a bowl with the other ingredients, usually some form of donkeyfood(salad for all you hippies..), along with whatever you chose as your ingredient, beef, cheese, mushrooms, etc. Etc. You mix those together and then comes the fun part. In the middle of your table there’s a huge like 45x45cm large plate. Which is hot. So you get to steak your own food at the table. Fun fun fun. Usually you coun about 1-2 okonomiyakis per person, so with 2-4 people sitting at the table you end up with lots of steaking and mixing and fun. There’s somekinda variations on the theme too, the Hiroshima version aparently doesn’t have the ingredients mixed for example. But we’ll see once we get to Osaka how the real deal is done.
Then there’s Ootoya, the most intresting of the restaurants I’ve visited. And yes, I’ve been there a few times. They are like this chain, but unlike all those Burger places I’ve also seen around they got pretty decent food, as in real food. Most portions have your miso soup, then some rice, of course -.- and whatever you orderd, my favorite so far is fried or steaked chicken with lotus and other veggies. Then you get to eat all that in a nice restaurant that’s usually centrally located, like in Hiroshima on the main shopping street, or in Shibuya close to Hachiko, Tower records etc. And since it’s in the second floor or basements, but not bottom floor you get the advantage of little tourists, and above all usually a window view onto the shopping frenzy happening out there. Really cool.
And of course there’s the whole raw fish deal. Sushi can be had both in restaurants served to the table, where you sometimes get good deals, but obviously the thing out here is kaitensushi, where they got the food circling around the cooking area and you sit there and just pick what you like as it cruises by. Incidentally Fuji TV had this voting thing where the people could vote the best places for that and Maguro Biito in Asakusa came in third. And obviously I stayed in Asakusa before, and once I get back to Tokyo it’s gonna be Ueno, so somewhat within walking distance, or if I’m too tired to walk within a stop or two of the ginza line.
I did try sashimi aswell, great stuff, although when i tried it there ended up being one fish that wasn’t really as tender and delicious as the rest. Since I can’t read the menus and so forth I got no idea which one that was. I know it wasn’t the salmon or tuna though, those were quite clear and absolutely delicious. You sort of get hungry just writing about them.
Oh well, that’s it for the food update while being on the Shinkansen. Let’s hope there’s net access at the hostel in Osaka, else I’ll have to go do some warwalking, find a mac shop or net cafe or something and just stalk infront of them while I boot up and upload this... ttyl
On the bright side that means nothing will ever be closed, and from what people say Osaka’s like the laid back version of Tokyo so it’ll be fun. That and they are like the inventors of Okonomiyaki, gods gift to hungry people. Except those in Afrika who don’t have electricity to warm the table plate.
Indeed it seems I got some time to muse about food here, since it’s still over an hour till we’re at shinOsaka. The best stuff I’ve eaten so far was prolly the okonomiyaki in Tokyo, in Hiroshima they have their own version of it where you don’t get to actually mix it yourself, but I had no time to test that one. I guess that’s one thing left for the next time I’m in Japan. Hiroshima seemed to have lots more to offer so that’ll have to be a stop next time round, preferably for like a week or something. There’s also the mountains which seem to be so much closer than when I was in Tokyo, but I’m again drifting from the important stuff, food.
Okonomiyaki is basically crepe dough that gets served to the table in a bowl with the other ingredients, usually some form of donkeyfood(salad for all you hippies..), along with whatever you chose as your ingredient, beef, cheese, mushrooms, etc. Etc. You mix those together and then comes the fun part. In the middle of your table there’s a huge like 45x45cm large plate. Which is hot. So you get to steak your own food at the table. Fun fun fun. Usually you coun about 1-2 okonomiyakis per person, so with 2-4 people sitting at the table you end up with lots of steaking and mixing and fun. There’s somekinda variations on the theme too, the Hiroshima version aparently doesn’t have the ingredients mixed for example. But we’ll see once we get to Osaka how the real deal is done.
Then there’s Ootoya, the most intresting of the restaurants I’ve visited. And yes, I’ve been there a few times. They are like this chain, but unlike all those Burger places I’ve also seen around they got pretty decent food, as in real food. Most portions have your miso soup, then some rice, of course -.- and whatever you orderd, my favorite so far is fried or steaked chicken with lotus and other veggies. Then you get to eat all that in a nice restaurant that’s usually centrally located, like in Hiroshima on the main shopping street, or in Shibuya close to Hachiko, Tower records etc. And since it’s in the second floor or basements, but not bottom floor you get the advantage of little tourists, and above all usually a window view onto the shopping frenzy happening out there. Really cool.
And of course there’s the whole raw fish deal. Sushi can be had both in restaurants served to the table, where you sometimes get good deals, but obviously the thing out here is kaitensushi, where they got the food circling around the cooking area and you sit there and just pick what you like as it cruises by. Incidentally Fuji TV had this voting thing where the people could vote the best places for that and Maguro Biito in Asakusa came in third. And obviously I stayed in Asakusa before, and once I get back to Tokyo it’s gonna be Ueno, so somewhat within walking distance, or if I’m too tired to walk within a stop or two of the ginza line.
I did try sashimi aswell, great stuff, although when i tried it there ended up being one fish that wasn’t really as tender and delicious as the rest. Since I can’t read the menus and so forth I got no idea which one that was. I know it wasn’t the salmon or tuna though, those were quite clear and absolutely delicious. You sort of get hungry just writing about them.
Oh well, that’s it for the food update while being on the Shinkansen. Let’s hope there’s net access at the hostel in Osaka, else I’ll have to go do some warwalking, find a mac shop or net cafe or something and just stalk infront of them while I boot up and upload this... ttyl
Hiroshima
Sitting in the hotel lobby , no wireless or wired access in my room here in Hiroshima. So this might be abit short, depending on how fast I can type.
1 Day in Hiroshima seems to be abit on the short side. I basically had time to check out the atom bomb museum, park, memorials etc aswell as Hiroshima Castle. There's tons more to see though, including a manga library that I now missed -.- . Sucks to be me... The atom bomb stuff is fairly extensive, and suffice to say rather depressive and bleak too, Nagasaki's museum feels rather small when you compare it to the one here. The park and surrounding stuff along with the atom bomb dome are also far larger, and there's more monuments here than in Nagasaki. The museum feels abit repetitive, there's a few places where the same stuff is repeated, on the other hand there's more momentos and pieces of clothes and personal belongings, mostly from children that are on display. And there's a whole video library with interviews with survivors, incase you're a real masochist and like breaking down into tears.
Aside from that, the Castle was abit of a letdown. While the atom bomb museum cost 50 yen, which almost feels like a rather symbolic gesture, the Castle was almost 300 yen and you get both less museum and content, especially if you're english. There's some signs but not all the stuff has been labeled and many things like the extensive sword collection will prolly bore normal people. Because of the bomb though the actual castle was destroyed so this is basically a nicelooking relatively new replica. Anyhow, from the castle grounds the thing you'll most likely remember if you were to visit it is the eucalyptus tree at the entrance, one of those trees that essentially survived the bomb only to live on, even today.
The rest of the town is pretty nice, there's a large shopping street with a roof, akin to the one in Asakusa, but with more intresting shops, really abit of something for everyone, going from computer parts and whole computers to the usual Hip hop clothes and record stores and about 30 varieties of the Starbucks coffee place. There's also both a Mitsukoshi and some other large stores so if you really feel like spending money that too is quite possible. Anyways the shinkansen doesn't wait, I'm off towards Shin Osaka station, from where I'll hopefully get to whereever my next hostel is. Aparently there's a Japanese style room waiting for me there. Should be fun.
1 Day in Hiroshima seems to be abit on the short side. I basically had time to check out the atom bomb museum, park, memorials etc aswell as Hiroshima Castle. There's tons more to see though, including a manga library that I now missed -.- . Sucks to be me... The atom bomb stuff is fairly extensive, and suffice to say rather depressive and bleak too, Nagasaki's museum feels rather small when you compare it to the one here. The park and surrounding stuff along with the atom bomb dome are also far larger, and there's more monuments here than in Nagasaki. The museum feels abit repetitive, there's a few places where the same stuff is repeated, on the other hand there's more momentos and pieces of clothes and personal belongings, mostly from children that are on display. And there's a whole video library with interviews with survivors, incase you're a real masochist and like breaking down into tears.
Aside from that, the Castle was abit of a letdown. While the atom bomb museum cost 50 yen, which almost feels like a rather symbolic gesture, the Castle was almost 300 yen and you get both less museum and content, especially if you're english. There's some signs but not all the stuff has been labeled and many things like the extensive sword collection will prolly bore normal people. Because of the bomb though the actual castle was destroyed so this is basically a nicelooking relatively new replica. Anyhow, from the castle grounds the thing you'll most likely remember if you were to visit it is the eucalyptus tree at the entrance, one of those trees that essentially survived the bomb only to live on, even today.
The rest of the town is pretty nice, there's a large shopping street with a roof, akin to the one in Asakusa, but with more intresting shops, really abit of something for everyone, going from computer parts and whole computers to the usual Hip hop clothes and record stores and about 30 varieties of the Starbucks coffee place. There's also both a Mitsukoshi and some other large stores so if you really feel like spending money that too is quite possible. Anyways the shinkansen doesn't wait, I'm off towards Shin Osaka station, from where I'll hopefully get to whereever my next hostel is. Aparently there's a Japanese style room waiting for me there. Should be fun.
Nagasaki, written on train, posted now...
There we go. Fukuoka is done, moving on to Hiroshima right now. Sadly there’s no wifi on the Shinkansen so when I upload this text I will actually already be in Hiroshima. Not that it matters much of course. 3 Nights in Fukuoka translates to 2 days there, which somehow feels abit too little. Saturday was awesome weather, and alot of walking. I went to Marinoa, a big outlet mall to the east of the city, at the sea, as the name implies. The highlight of the place were prolly the cars I saw there, not the actual mall itself. From there I came back into Fukuoka proper, stopping at a big park with a lake. Sun was shining and there was tons of stuff to see there, lots of people, a Japanese garden to the south of it, and then towards Fukuoka, to the west there are the ruins of the former castle.
That brings us to 2 ruins, no proper castle though that I’ve visited yet atleast. But I remain hopeful. There’s one of the best castles in Japan close to Osaka in Himeji, and Osaka itself has a castle, although that one has been rebuilt so it’s not exactly original anymore. It seems most castles and temples and shrines aren’t the original ones, someone at some point seems to have usually destroyed them....
Anyhow, inside the castle, or just to the side of it there’s some sports fields etc, and there some kids soccer team was playing, quite the place to do some soccer at, with high walls and stuff in the background, although I assume for them that’s just normal. From there I walked along the backroads into Fukuoka/Hakata’s central Tenjin area. It’s kinda fun how the place changed really suddenly from the tiny backroads and older houses into what I’ve gotten to accept as modern day Tokyo, 8 to 10 story high shopping malls and department stores, wide roads, and lots and lots of people...
Through Tenjin I got to Canal City, the latest mall in Fukuoka, boasting a canal in the middle of it(Hence the name -.- ). There were even more stores, and people. Back to the Hostel for some sleep and an early morning wakeup.
Sunday starts with breakfast early, followed by a 2 hour train ride on the Kamome Express to Nagasaki. There I almost got off at the wrong station, which as it later turns out would have actually been closer to the sites I was planning to visit than was the actual Nagasaki station. Irony... Nagasaki was the smalles of the cities I’ve visited so far, and unlike Fukuoka or Tokyo it’s not situated in a plain but stuck between mountains along a river close to the sea so there’s no real mass of city where the only thing you see are houses and more houses. At all times you can see the Mountains to either side which strengthens the small town feel. And with smalltown we obviously think of something in the line of 200.000 ish thousand inhabitants...
The first and obvious reason most people come to visit Nagasaki is the atomic bomb that was dropped there by the US in the last days of the second world war. It was dropped in the northern parts of town which meant that the mountains and layout of the city actually saved certain parts of the town to the southeast. In the north however obviously everything died. In the area where it exploded there’s 3 or 4 mayor sites, depending on how you rate a church. A couple years before the war the christians of Nagasaki had finally got their church built, and for some years it was the biggest church in Asia. Until the bomb came. The church was about 500 meters or so from the blast hypocenter and only a wall was left standing. Now the church has been rebuilt so you can visit that if you want to. The 3 more important sites are the Peace Park, built ontop of the Hill next to the Hypocenter, where a prison housing forced labor and criminals was. The whole place was obviously destroyed and today there’s a park with statues from mainly ex soviet block countries reminding us of world peace and unity... Then there’s the obvious Hypocenter which has been made into an open area , with a single black Monolith standing at the spot where the bomb exploded 500m in the air. Close to it is also a single corner from the wall of the church. And from there up the stairs to the east is the museum, with a pretty nice and visual depiction of what happened there aswell as alot of information about what the current situation in the world is in regards to atomic weapons. Heavy stuff, now I’m on the train to Hiroshima, where hopefully I’ll visit the other hypocenter and a larger Museum. Assuming I find a free net or the Hotel has net access I should be able to post this and hopefully some stuff about Hiroshima too. Ttyl.
Oh and ps. : Wizard, no schoolgirl pics for you -.-
That brings us to 2 ruins, no proper castle though that I’ve visited yet atleast. But I remain hopeful. There’s one of the best castles in Japan close to Osaka in Himeji, and Osaka itself has a castle, although that one has been rebuilt so it’s not exactly original anymore. It seems most castles and temples and shrines aren’t the original ones, someone at some point seems to have usually destroyed them....
Anyhow, inside the castle, or just to the side of it there’s some sports fields etc, and there some kids soccer team was playing, quite the place to do some soccer at, with high walls and stuff in the background, although I assume for them that’s just normal. From there I walked along the backroads into Fukuoka/Hakata’s central Tenjin area. It’s kinda fun how the place changed really suddenly from the tiny backroads and older houses into what I’ve gotten to accept as modern day Tokyo, 8 to 10 story high shopping malls and department stores, wide roads, and lots and lots of people...
Through Tenjin I got to Canal City, the latest mall in Fukuoka, boasting a canal in the middle of it(Hence the name -.- ). There were even more stores, and people. Back to the Hostel for some sleep and an early morning wakeup.
Sunday starts with breakfast early, followed by a 2 hour train ride on the Kamome Express to Nagasaki. There I almost got off at the wrong station, which as it later turns out would have actually been closer to the sites I was planning to visit than was the actual Nagasaki station. Irony... Nagasaki was the smalles of the cities I’ve visited so far, and unlike Fukuoka or Tokyo it’s not situated in a plain but stuck between mountains along a river close to the sea so there’s no real mass of city where the only thing you see are houses and more houses. At all times you can see the Mountains to either side which strengthens the small town feel. And with smalltown we obviously think of something in the line of 200.000 ish thousand inhabitants...
The first and obvious reason most people come to visit Nagasaki is the atomic bomb that was dropped there by the US in the last days of the second world war. It was dropped in the northern parts of town which meant that the mountains and layout of the city actually saved certain parts of the town to the southeast. In the north however obviously everything died. In the area where it exploded there’s 3 or 4 mayor sites, depending on how you rate a church. A couple years before the war the christians of Nagasaki had finally got their church built, and for some years it was the biggest church in Asia. Until the bomb came. The church was about 500 meters or so from the blast hypocenter and only a wall was left standing. Now the church has been rebuilt so you can visit that if you want to. The 3 more important sites are the Peace Park, built ontop of the Hill next to the Hypocenter, where a prison housing forced labor and criminals was. The whole place was obviously destroyed and today there’s a park with statues from mainly ex soviet block countries reminding us of world peace and unity... Then there’s the obvious Hypocenter which has been made into an open area , with a single black Monolith standing at the spot where the bomb exploded 500m in the air. Close to it is also a single corner from the wall of the church. And from there up the stairs to the east is the museum, with a pretty nice and visual depiction of what happened there aswell as alot of information about what the current situation in the world is in regards to atomic weapons. Heavy stuff, now I’m on the train to Hiroshima, where hopefully I’ll visit the other hypocenter and a larger Museum. Assuming I find a free net or the Hotel has net access I should be able to post this and hopefully some stuff about Hiroshima too. Ttyl.
Oh and ps. : Wizard, no schoolgirl pics for you -.-
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Friday, March 16, 2007
In Fukuoka now!
Arrived at 15:44. As the ticket said. Shinkansen seems to be just about as punctual as an atomic clock, read somewhere that their best year with the Shinkansen had 12 seconds delay from the timetable, in total, for all Shinkansen... That could obviously be just another urban myth, but the trains seem to be really really fast, and punctual. And it's not just the trains. It's like the whole system around them too. At the station all the doors for the trains are marked on the platforms, and the trains stop within centimeters of those markings. And there's markings as to where to stay and wait for the train to stop too, so all the people can exit the train before you board it.
At the final stops, like here in Fukuoka or at the starting platform in Tokyo cleaning crews enter the train after it's stopped and emptied. There's about 20 minutes or so in the schedule calculated for the cleaning. For a whole train. That's 8 wagons on the Hikari Railstar, or 12 on the Hikari. They also change the direction the seats are facing, since obviously you'd be wasting valuable time if you'd have to go turn the train around, and who'd ever want to sit facing away from the travel direction... So, train stops, people get out and these old ladies in pink uniforms get onboard, and like clockwork they take those pieces of paper on the pillows, although they atleast on the Railstar from Osaka to Fukuoka were actually some kind of linen, then they work like robots and clean the train up. As in there's like 3 people per wagon cleaning it.... And it looks like new after that 15 to 20 minutes... Really freaky, I should prolly import one of those ladies to clean up my apartment, have her locked down in the basement and then give her 5 minutes a day to clean the 2 floors.
Then there were the saleswagons on the train. The woman selling stuff would bow everytime she entered the wagon, and she'd excuse herself like that too when she left. Every time, like every half hour for the wagon I was at....
But enough typing for now,I'm hungry and there seems to be some convinience store at the road on the other side of the block, and there was some cheap food place too, so it's prolly time to do the first attack into Fukuoka, see what we come up with. And I don't have maps of the place either, so chances are a small backtrack to Fukuoka's train station is in order to hit the Tourist info there for all the good stuff. bbl.
At the final stops, like here in Fukuoka or at the starting platform in Tokyo cleaning crews enter the train after it's stopped and emptied. There's about 20 minutes or so in the schedule calculated for the cleaning. For a whole train. That's 8 wagons on the Hikari Railstar, or 12 on the Hikari. They also change the direction the seats are facing, since obviously you'd be wasting valuable time if you'd have to go turn the train around, and who'd ever want to sit facing away from the travel direction... So, train stops, people get out and these old ladies in pink uniforms get onboard, and like clockwork they take those pieces of paper on the pillows, although they atleast on the Railstar from Osaka to Fukuoka were actually some kind of linen, then they work like robots and clean the train up. As in there's like 3 people per wagon cleaning it.... And it looks like new after that 15 to 20 minutes... Really freaky, I should prolly import one of those ladies to clean up my apartment, have her locked down in the basement and then give her 5 minutes a day to clean the 2 floors.
Then there were the saleswagons on the train. The woman selling stuff would bow everytime she entered the wagon, and she'd excuse herself like that too when she left. Every time, like every half hour for the wagon I was at....
But enough typing for now,I'm hungry and there seems to be some convinience store at the road on the other side of the block, and there was some cheap food place too, so it's prolly time to do the first attack into Fukuoka, see what we come up with. And I don't have maps of the place either, so chances are a small backtrack to Fukuoka's train station is in order to hit the Tourist info there for all the good stuff. bbl.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Tokyo shodown
Yea, I forgot the w in showdown, that's a reference to something most people won't get. Anyhow, last day in Tokyo, tomorrow I'll be on the Shinkansen, bound for Fukuoka, although the train station there is named Hakata. That's cause it used to be 2 cities, but now it's just one larger city. Including the stop at Osaka, the whole train ride should take about 6.5 hours, so alot of time sitting around going at 250km/h or so.
In Fukuoka I got a room reserved at Khaosan Fukuoka, which as the name implies is somehow related to Khaosan Tokyo where I'm at now. It's a new place though, so you get your robotsuperprogrammable toilet seat and hopefully better airconditioning/heaters in the rooms. Overall though this has been a great place, my rooms about 2 or 3 tatami in size, so basically there's my bed and then about 40cm floor next to it, and some single window that is really really bad for heating. If some guidebook tells you it's cold in Japan cause they don't build insulation etc very well then you better take their word for it. I shall post some pics of the room once I get around to taking them. Including one of the lovely view of the neighboring house which is like half a meter from my window.
In Tokyo space seems indeed to be a luxury. There's next to no real public spaces where you can just hang out and sit down, not counting the parks that are scattered through the city of course. But as you can see from the pictures I took at Mori tower there aren't that many of those. There is the occasional temple ofc, but who'd wanna spend their day sitting in a temple. The Tokyo way thus is a cafee, be it Starbucks, Excelsior, Doutour, Pronto, or one of the smaller chains. People pay the 300 or more yen for a coffee or juice, which while being frish gepresst as the germans say is still in a small glass with half the glass full of ice... So yea, a coffee costs about as much as a good hamburger, or the cheapest meal at Yoshinoya, but on the bright side you get a place to sit at. And most of the places are spread over several floors so you can sit for hours at the big crossing looking over Hachiko at Shibuya if you want, or over any other roads in the city, whatever the place there's always people, people and more people...
Then there's the mangacafees which somehow have taken over where the internetcafees used to be. With email and net access over mobile phones those places were destined to die out anyhow. For an hourly rate of about 100yen or so you get to read manga and drink coffee etc, with the bonus of a net access usually present. In addition it seems Mac stores and a few other select places have open Wifi running, so you could do some surfing via WLAN with a laptop here and there.
After a couple of weeks of this insane place a smaller place like Fukuoka with just a couple million people should be refreshing. In the southern island, Kyushu, where Fukuoka is, you'll find volcanoes and a whole bunch of onsens, oldschool bathhouses with springwater that's been heated by the ground. There should be various places that can heal just about anything. Assuming my cold isn't as bad as it's now I should be able to check out some of those. And there's of course also Nagasaki, scene of an atomic bomb blast. And great ramen, and food stalls all around the town.
Which brings me to costs :
The common things here cost something like :
300 yen for a hamburger, 300 for coffee/tea, 500-1000 yen for lunch/dinner, 150 - 300 yen for subway/train in tokyo, depending on trip length... With 1 euro being about 153 or so yen. So food's generally cheap, traveling around can get expensive, oh and fruit etc is usually expensive, they sell apples for 139 yen each at the local supermarket....
In Fukuoka I got a room reserved at Khaosan Fukuoka, which as the name implies is somehow related to Khaosan Tokyo where I'm at now. It's a new place though, so you get your robotsuperprogrammable toilet seat and hopefully better airconditioning/heaters in the rooms. Overall though this has been a great place, my rooms about 2 or 3 tatami in size, so basically there's my bed and then about 40cm floor next to it, and some single window that is really really bad for heating. If some guidebook tells you it's cold in Japan cause they don't build insulation etc very well then you better take their word for it. I shall post some pics of the room once I get around to taking them. Including one of the lovely view of the neighboring house which is like half a meter from my window.
In Tokyo space seems indeed to be a luxury. There's next to no real public spaces where you can just hang out and sit down, not counting the parks that are scattered through the city of course. But as you can see from the pictures I took at Mori tower there aren't that many of those. There is the occasional temple ofc, but who'd wanna spend their day sitting in a temple. The Tokyo way thus is a cafee, be it Starbucks, Excelsior, Doutour, Pronto, or one of the smaller chains. People pay the 300 or more yen for a coffee or juice, which while being frish gepresst as the germans say is still in a small glass with half the glass full of ice... So yea, a coffee costs about as much as a good hamburger, or the cheapest meal at Yoshinoya, but on the bright side you get a place to sit at. And most of the places are spread over several floors so you can sit for hours at the big crossing looking over Hachiko at Shibuya if you want, or over any other roads in the city, whatever the place there's always people, people and more people...
Then there's the mangacafees which somehow have taken over where the internetcafees used to be. With email and net access over mobile phones those places were destined to die out anyhow. For an hourly rate of about 100yen or so you get to read manga and drink coffee etc, with the bonus of a net access usually present. In addition it seems Mac stores and a few other select places have open Wifi running, so you could do some surfing via WLAN with a laptop here and there.
After a couple of weeks of this insane place a smaller place like Fukuoka with just a couple million people should be refreshing. In the southern island, Kyushu, where Fukuoka is, you'll find volcanoes and a whole bunch of onsens, oldschool bathhouses with springwater that's been heated by the ground. There should be various places that can heal just about anything. Assuming my cold isn't as bad as it's now I should be able to check out some of those. And there's of course also Nagasaki, scene of an atomic bomb blast. And great ramen, and food stalls all around the town.
Which brings me to costs :
The common things here cost something like :
300 yen for a hamburger, 300 for coffee/tea, 500-1000 yen for lunch/dinner, 150 - 300 yen for subway/train in tokyo, depending on trip length... With 1 euro being about 153 or so yen. So food's generally cheap, traveling around can get expensive, oh and fruit etc is usually expensive, they sell apples for 139 yen each at the local supermarket....
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
macbook and palace
So I went ahead and got a macbook. go me. I can now upload pictures as I want, which is handy. I can also do some editing on them. And I got a whole bunch of storage space so I can shoot away as much as I want.
Apart from that today was Imperial palace, the third try at it... First time round I didn't find the entrances. Second time round it was closed. Third time round all went well and I got in there and the weather was pretty good too. Awesome. It seem that while everything else is built small, like roads, houses that are abou 4 meters wide but 10 stories high, cars that are really tiny etc... the palace and its gardens have to be absolutely huge. Just check the size out on google earth. It's like insane... You walk and walk and walk and then you realise that you're not even close to where you thought you'd already be. My plan was to go through the palace, past the gardens, north towards Yasukuni shrine, where the cabinet and prime minister go yearly to pay tribute to all the people who have died in the wars Japan's been involved in. Including obviously certain A-class war criminals. Then China and others get all fuzzy about the visit and lots of talk ensues..
Anyhow, after a whole bunch of walking I finally get out from the actual imperial gardens and realise theres prolly about 2-3 km more of walking to get to the shrine itself, not including the 500 or so meter long walkway up to the shrine from its eastern entrance. I did walk past the budokan, the judo arena of the 1964 olympics. So my guidebook says. Obviously I only know it cause all those weird artists I listen to tend to make liveDVDs from their gigs at the budokan. So past that, and then another km or so to the train to get away. Oh, the place was like any other shinto shrine I've visited here, apart from a larger than normal amount of small tiny school children in uniform who aparently are being indoctrinated into the latest generation of yasukuni visitors...
But enough with sarcasm over some stupid temple, yesterday was a visit to another sort of temple, one made for and with money...
From Asakusa, indeed, from about 50 meters north from the guesthouse, on the northern side of the bridge right across from the Asahi Beer HQ, sumida river water busses depart for various places along the river and Tokyo bay. For a whooping 1220 yen you can go to Odaiba. As seen in my mobile phone picture from yesterday Odaiba is also at the other end of a huge huge bridge, and there's also a tunnel for cars that runs from the mainland to Odaiba. The whole place is a manmade island, with a ton of new houses, and shopping centers. And it's like almost deserted, which is quite weird after visiting almost every other large area of Tokyo and always running into amazing amounts of people. It's also been designed and built in a way that's prolly more US than Japan, with large roads and open spaces, so it all feels rather deserted when you compare it to Mori's Roppongi Hills, or Shinjuku etc...I tried some japanese curry there, which is not to be mistaken with indian food. It was decent but you can beat the 660 yen cost by atleast half if you go to a gjuudon place like Yoshinoka which have their 24 hour open places all around town, no guarantees you'll like the taste of that though after a week...I'm diverting from Odaiba in general though, apologies. After some windowshopping in the almost empty shopping mall I headed towards the MeSci, Tokyo's museum for science and innovation, the place where you can watch all sorts of hightech gear and ideas and often also play around with most of them. There's some robots, maglev trains, space stuff and a gigantic ball full of leds which can be used to see what the weather is like on the whole planet, how warm it is etc... They also have some really nice multimedia libraries that are free to use, and contain both japanese and english stuff, including interviews and documentaries and so forth. Nothing like ending a museum visit with a 45 minute explanation of how and why Challenger exploded killing 7 astronauts, as explained by NASAs research and investigations team in a really really matter of fact voice.
Almost next to the MeSci museum there's a gigantic manmade house that's made to look like a big cruise ship. It's the maritime museum, but sadly it was already late so I took the monorail over the bridge back into Tokyo...
Apart from that today was Imperial palace, the third try at it... First time round I didn't find the entrances. Second time round it was closed. Third time round all went well and I got in there and the weather was pretty good too. Awesome. It seem that while everything else is built small, like roads, houses that are abou 4 meters wide but 10 stories high, cars that are really tiny etc... the palace and its gardens have to be absolutely huge. Just check the size out on google earth. It's like insane... You walk and walk and walk and then you realise that you're not even close to where you thought you'd already be. My plan was to go through the palace, past the gardens, north towards Yasukuni shrine, where the cabinet and prime minister go yearly to pay tribute to all the people who have died in the wars Japan's been involved in. Including obviously certain A-class war criminals. Then China and others get all fuzzy about the visit and lots of talk ensues..
Anyhow, after a whole bunch of walking I finally get out from the actual imperial gardens and realise theres prolly about 2-3 km more of walking to get to the shrine itself, not including the 500 or so meter long walkway up to the shrine from its eastern entrance. I did walk past the budokan, the judo arena of the 1964 olympics. So my guidebook says. Obviously I only know it cause all those weird artists I listen to tend to make liveDVDs from their gigs at the budokan. So past that, and then another km or so to the train to get away. Oh, the place was like any other shinto shrine I've visited here, apart from a larger than normal amount of small tiny school children in uniform who aparently are being indoctrinated into the latest generation of yasukuni visitors...
But enough with sarcasm over some stupid temple, yesterday was a visit to another sort of temple, one made for and with money...
From Asakusa, indeed, from about 50 meters north from the guesthouse, on the northern side of the bridge right across from the Asahi Beer HQ, sumida river water busses depart for various places along the river and Tokyo bay. For a whooping 1220 yen you can go to Odaiba. As seen in my mobile phone picture from yesterday Odaiba is also at the other end of a huge huge bridge, and there's also a tunnel for cars that runs from the mainland to Odaiba. The whole place is a manmade island, with a ton of new houses, and shopping centers. And it's like almost deserted, which is quite weird after visiting almost every other large area of Tokyo and always running into amazing amounts of people. It's also been designed and built in a way that's prolly more US than Japan, with large roads and open spaces, so it all feels rather deserted when you compare it to Mori's Roppongi Hills, or Shinjuku etc...I tried some japanese curry there, which is not to be mistaken with indian food. It was decent but you can beat the 660 yen cost by atleast half if you go to a gjuudon place like Yoshinoka which have their 24 hour open places all around town, no guarantees you'll like the taste of that though after a week...I'm diverting from Odaiba in general though, apologies. After some windowshopping in the almost empty shopping mall I headed towards the MeSci, Tokyo's museum for science and innovation, the place where you can watch all sorts of hightech gear and ideas and often also play around with most of them. There's some robots, maglev trains, space stuff and a gigantic ball full of leds which can be used to see what the weather is like on the whole planet, how warm it is etc... They also have some really nice multimedia libraries that are free to use, and contain both japanese and english stuff, including interviews and documentaries and so forth. Nothing like ending a museum visit with a 45 minute explanation of how and why Challenger exploded killing 7 astronauts, as explained by NASAs research and investigations team in a really really matter of fact voice.
Almost next to the MeSci museum there's a gigantic manmade house that's made to look like a big cruise ship. It's the maritime museum, but sadly it was already late so I took the monorail over the bridge back into Tokyo...
Imperial palace
Third try, finally found the entrance and it actually is open. Great weather too...more later.
Monday, March 12, 2007
10 am, laundry time.
Sitting in the middle of residential Asakusa at a coin laundry, sun is nice and it seems yesterdays rain is a thing of the past.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
9am, rain
It's cold and rainy and wet and stuff outside. And it's sunday, which would normally entaiil a visit to Harajuku. But who knows, perhaps the rain ends before I head off, else it might just be alot of walking in rain today... It's also the last sunday I'll be spending fully in Tokyo since the next sunday will be in Fukuoka to the south, and then the next one I'll be coming back to Tokyo from Osaka. Thankfully the net is full of pictures from Harajuku so even if there's nothing happening this sunday there's a bunch of pictures out there.
Yesterday was some architecture students final thesis presentations in daikanyama which is sort of a nice hillside area with lots of small houses and shops and stuff. The architecture dudes did great powerpoint presentations in japanese so I understood just about 2 words, but all their models for their stuff were also out so atleast there was something to look at. After that it was off to the suburbs, Kichijoji or something and another smaller suburb out to the west of Tokyo. Although some might debate whether something's a suburb if it looks and feels like you're in one of Tokyos 10 or so citycentres and the whole way to the place just looks the same, houses houses and more houses.... Lots of people, lots of shops, and the occasional temple in the middle of it all, almost deserted and a nice silent place somehow weirdly disconnected from the whole shopping frenzy going on just meters away.
Oh well, time to plan the next important move, where to buy one of those shiny seethrough umbrellas which everyone here seems to own for days like these, I shall be back later, ttyl.
Yesterday was some architecture students final thesis presentations in daikanyama which is sort of a nice hillside area with lots of small houses and shops and stuff. The architecture dudes did great powerpoint presentations in japanese so I understood just about 2 words, but all their models for their stuff were also out so atleast there was something to look at. After that it was off to the suburbs, Kichijoji or something and another smaller suburb out to the west of Tokyo. Although some might debate whether something's a suburb if it looks and feels like you're in one of Tokyos 10 or so citycentres and the whole way to the place just looks the same, houses houses and more houses.... Lots of people, lots of shops, and the occasional temple in the middle of it all, almost deserted and a nice silent place somehow weirdly disconnected from the whole shopping frenzy going on just meters away.
Oh well, time to plan the next important move, where to buy one of those shiny seethrough umbrellas which everyone here seems to own for days like these, I shall be back later, ttyl.
Friday, March 9, 2007
ok. Its gonna take ages to upload all pictures. Using the hostel's shared computers, of which only 2 have usb 1.1, and the upload speed isn't amazing. In fact its more like 1 minute per picture, since I can't edit the pictures either and they simply are in 3008x2000 pixel size with jpeg set to fine. That said I did manage to upload a few last night, they can be found at my flickr page, here http://www.flickr.com/photos/45387146@N00/ . I'll try to upload some more tonight or during the day, depending on what I decide to do today.
So, the museum was great. As in really great. It's built like some kind of sunken in 3 story building with one floor underground, different colores on the wall, lots of small details that point at various Ghibli movies, and there's several constant exhibitions, aswell as a couple places meant for changing shows. Those were a gallery of an upcoming russian animation that looks like a painting from the romantic era, or whatever the time was called, lots of pastells, everything looked handpainted... And then there was a larger exhibition about Aardman and their figures, and ofc their movies. But who really comes there to watch some european stuff when on the other floors on the other side of the main hall there's the Ghibli stuff.
That stuff is one big showcase of what animation is about, with several rooms that basically form a story and show how an animation is born, from just general drawings and clips and pictures showing anything from boats to landscapes all built like somekind of imaginary kids room full with things that'll inspire and help creativity. Then it moves on through drawings to storyboards, character animations, studying of framing, painting backgrounds, coloring cels, taking the screens of the cels, and finally editing the actual movie. Pretty sweet stuff. Then downstairs there was 2 things, a movie theater screening 2 of a group of movies made by the studyio exclusively for the museum, with them changing around which 2 movies they show every day. And obviously you can only see one movie per entrance ticket so there's like a reason to come back. They also change around stuff inside the museum daily so chances are no 2 visits to it will be alike. Oh and the other thing downstairs was a exhibition room showcasing the birth of film and animation, first with those round things where you peek into a hole and it'll show a small changing set of images, and then with a huge huge 3D model of a tree, lots of totoros and then all that turns around, is blasted with strobelight and it looks as if it's actuallly moving. I think there's over 350 or so 3D figures built in that one to make it work. Sadly no picture taking inside so the entrance is the only thing I took a picture off. Good thing their shop sells a book about the msueum with tons of pictures and background information so I got that too.
Anyhow, after the museum visit I did some traveling around Tokyo and ended up here, with headache and a sore throat. Yay. Decided to stay at the guesthouse for the evening, take it easy and go to bed early. Which was a great plan until an old man came around and started chatting with his granddaughter in finnish of all languages. Soon enough we were chatting away about Tokyo, Japan and what were the good and bad things so far. And in walks this young couple from as it turns out Tampere. So from a nice loong sleep and quiet evening it went into something of a spontaneous Finland meet in the livingroom, prolly scaring the other people who suddenly were onslaughted by 5 people talking Finnish.
Next morning, 8th March, I decided to go visit the highest place in town, which incidentally seems to be not the Tokyo Tower but fairly close to it, the Mori built Roppongi Complex, with the Mori Tower. In his infinite wisdom mr. Mori chose to put his private little art museum into the top floors of his skyscraper. So up the elevator to the 52nd floor of the Mori tower, then escalators to the 53rd and into an exhibition about Laughter in art. Starting with old old figures all the way round through religious paintings to pretty much everything all through to modern day art. Which somehow features some finnish stuff too. Yay again. There was alot of cool things there, like a brain that just jumps around on the floor, or well, lots of artsy stuff... After the museum there's the 52nd floor again, which has been made into a sightseeing floor. So you can walk around the whole building and see Tokyo in every direction. Out with the camera and about 40 pictures of various directions of Tokyo. The aforementioned Tokyo Tower looks really great from here, and reminds you that indeed it's not the tallest place in town anymore. Also mount fuji can be seen on a good day, sadly though there was abit too much clouds and smog so I only got the outlines of it...
After being in a museum I decided to do the proper thing and visit Finland's embassy to do my voting. Jonas W. better do the same in finland... Found the embassy, got to speak some more finnish, and after that little fun venture I headed through akihabara once more, on to Ueno, and then back to the hostel. Which brings us to here, and now. With the cleaning crew in action here I think it's time to head out there somewhere, although it's fairly cold and cloudy... -.- . I guess I'll just have to think of something to do, there's still some places I've not been too yet, I think...
So, the museum was great. As in really great. It's built like some kind of sunken in 3 story building with one floor underground, different colores on the wall, lots of small details that point at various Ghibli movies, and there's several constant exhibitions, aswell as a couple places meant for changing shows. Those were a gallery of an upcoming russian animation that looks like a painting from the romantic era, or whatever the time was called, lots of pastells, everything looked handpainted... And then there was a larger exhibition about Aardman and their figures, and ofc their movies. But who really comes there to watch some european stuff when on the other floors on the other side of the main hall there's the Ghibli stuff.
That stuff is one big showcase of what animation is about, with several rooms that basically form a story and show how an animation is born, from just general drawings and clips and pictures showing anything from boats to landscapes all built like somekind of imaginary kids room full with things that'll inspire and help creativity. Then it moves on through drawings to storyboards, character animations, studying of framing, painting backgrounds, coloring cels, taking the screens of the cels, and finally editing the actual movie. Pretty sweet stuff. Then downstairs there was 2 things, a movie theater screening 2 of a group of movies made by the studyio exclusively for the museum, with them changing around which 2 movies they show every day. And obviously you can only see one movie per entrance ticket so there's like a reason to come back. They also change around stuff inside the museum daily so chances are no 2 visits to it will be alike. Oh and the other thing downstairs was a exhibition room showcasing the birth of film and animation, first with those round things where you peek into a hole and it'll show a small changing set of images, and then with a huge huge 3D model of a tree, lots of totoros and then all that turns around, is blasted with strobelight and it looks as if it's actuallly moving. I think there's over 350 or so 3D figures built in that one to make it work. Sadly no picture taking inside so the entrance is the only thing I took a picture off. Good thing their shop sells a book about the msueum with tons of pictures and background information so I got that too.
Anyhow, after the museum visit I did some traveling around Tokyo and ended up here, with headache and a sore throat. Yay. Decided to stay at the guesthouse for the evening, take it easy and go to bed early. Which was a great plan until an old man came around and started chatting with his granddaughter in finnish of all languages. Soon enough we were chatting away about Tokyo, Japan and what were the good and bad things so far. And in walks this young couple from as it turns out Tampere. So from a nice loong sleep and quiet evening it went into something of a spontaneous Finland meet in the livingroom, prolly scaring the other people who suddenly were onslaughted by 5 people talking Finnish.
Next morning, 8th March, I decided to go visit the highest place in town, which incidentally seems to be not the Tokyo Tower but fairly close to it, the Mori built Roppongi Complex, with the Mori Tower. In his infinite wisdom mr. Mori chose to put his private little art museum into the top floors of his skyscraper. So up the elevator to the 52nd floor of the Mori tower, then escalators to the 53rd and into an exhibition about Laughter in art. Starting with old old figures all the way round through religious paintings to pretty much everything all through to modern day art. Which somehow features some finnish stuff too. Yay again. There was alot of cool things there, like a brain that just jumps around on the floor, or well, lots of artsy stuff... After the museum there's the 52nd floor again, which has been made into a sightseeing floor. So you can walk around the whole building and see Tokyo in every direction. Out with the camera and about 40 pictures of various directions of Tokyo. The aforementioned Tokyo Tower looks really great from here, and reminds you that indeed it's not the tallest place in town anymore. Also mount fuji can be seen on a good day, sadly though there was abit too much clouds and smog so I only got the outlines of it...
After being in a museum I decided to do the proper thing and visit Finland's embassy to do my voting. Jonas W. better do the same in finland... Found the embassy, got to speak some more finnish, and after that little fun venture I headed through akihabara once more, on to Ueno, and then back to the hostel. Which brings us to here, and now. With the cleaning crew in action here I think it's time to head out there somewhere, although it's fairly cold and cloudy... -.- . I guess I'll just have to think of something to do, there's still some places I've not been too yet, I think...
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Yay
Bought a nice usb 1.1 and 2.0 memorycard reader so I can now upload images. Which I am doing as I type this. Will post a link once they are online, although it might take a while, it being about 500 images at 3008x2000 pixels. And yes, all of them aren't worth checking out...
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
yay
Akiba was great fun, lots of crazy ass computer gear there. Like 30cm fans, smaller fans with text on them while they are spinning and obviously some just regular lighted fans with nice chrome protector plates. Then HDs, everything really. And like the most massive cooling systems i've seen so far, I'd assume my motherboard would break apart from the weight of those things... not that a normal computer case has any room for like 30cm of copper -.- Oh well, I gotta go plan my day,I shall be back....
Monday, March 5, 2007
Monday
Monday today, Nano's off to his internship so It'll be me all alone with 27 million japanese people in Tokyo today. Since the last 3 days have somehow focused on the southside around Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku etc I figured today should be a visit to something closer, like Ueno and Akihabara. Guesthouse computers don't have USB 2.0 aparently so I can't unload images from my camera, which sucks bigtime. After 2 days I've shot almost 200 images, which puts down a rate of about 5 days per 2 gig memorycard if I can't go unload and upload them online or something. Anyhow I need breakfast now, so I'll be back later and stuff.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
yay
Yay,guesthouse computer. Should be able to type abit more than from the phone. Met my old school mate from Stockholm yesterday, although he aparently had to wait for me for an hour since the damn flight was abit late. Tokyo station seems to be abit larger than the Helsinki metro system altogether -.- but other than that the whole subway and train stuff seems to work pretty nicely, although traveling alot through town would appear to cost alot, you get a couple hundred yen per trip so it adds up during a day. The obvious solution is to not travel around, go one place and spend the day there... Yesterday became somewhat of a roundtrip, from Tokyo station through Ginza over to the hostel here in Asakusa and then on back to Shinjuku and Shibuya. Alot of neon out there, and tons of places, bars clubs, and huge ass pachinko parlors that seem to defy much logic. But who knows, most go try it out someday, 1k yen for some metallic balls you throw into some machine and watch land somewhere... I did try out the drum music game thing as seen on youtube, was alot of fun.
Oh and food's great, as in really really great. Prices there go from like 400ish up to prolly 100000 or something. Anyhow gotta do stuff now, I shall be back.
Oh and food's great, as in really really great. Prices there go from like 400ish up to prolly 100000 or something. Anyhow gotta do stuff now, I shall be back.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Best airport in the world...
Sitting at gate 32 right now, obviously bored cause i'd not be writing he stuff would be happening... Manu chao seems to be the perfect music for the weird mix of people here, got russians, chinese and some rabbi just walked past too. International D. Indeed.
And so it begins...
We have a nice little snowstorm starting up as I leave the house. Temperature is around 0 c. Tokyo forecast is 10 c warm. Just a couple things to take care of in Helsinki and them off to the airport. Mobile blogging ftw!
And I'm off!
Yay, today I'm flying, gotta do some final cleaning at home, and after that it's off to the airport. I'll be back in a month, obviously I shall do updates here more or less regularly. Oh and LingLing the panda needs to get some rest....
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
T-1 and counting
Oh yea, packing's almost done, lets hope I get atleast some sleep tonight cause tomorrow will be on really really looong day -.-....
Saturday, February 24, 2007
5 more days
Yay, 3 more days of work, 5 more days total till I fly away from this hellhole. I put the Tokyo weather on the page so you can look at how warm and nice it's there while Finland remains a frozen hellhole, just like Winnipeg. It's that bar on the side, incase you don't actually move your eyes to the side of the screen -.- that far. --->>>
Sunday, February 18, 2007
music
I need to decide what music to take with me. Space is 1GB. Any and all suggestions are welcome. From the 3 people that read this :P
Just leave a comment, or msg me in IRC or MSN or something.
Just leave a comment, or msg me in IRC or MSN or something.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
New Blog :: T-15 days
Well, This will be my blog space for the duration of my litte trip to japan. I'll prolly write in various languages so umm try to survive not always understanding everything. If I can throw images online from my camera those will prolly be on flickr, links posted here. And yes, 2 weeks and one day till I fly and I got work on 11 of those 14 days...
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