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....