Tokyo!

This is a HUGE post because I'm uploading my notes from all four days in Tokyo all at once - I didn't manage to find a WiFi hotspot any time before this - finally got one at the airport. So here's the full report.

Day 1:

Landed in Tokyo a bit after noon - walked through the easiest immigration I've ever seen in any country - no questions asked at all. Then got on to the Keisei skyliner train to get to Ueno - I wasn't too sure which way to go from Ueno station so decided to play it safe and take a taxi - the taxi driver ended up being a total sweetheart - the final fare camne up to like Y1500, but he refused to take more than Y1000, saying I was a tourist and he wouldn't accept more. Wow!Anyway, the ryokan (Japanese inn) I'm staying at is absolutely gorgeous - it's got these little tiny rooms where you sit on floor cushions and sleep on floor mattresses and everything's all traditional and Japanese. Very quaint and I love it. It's called Homeikan and here's a pic:


Right after I checked in, I decided to go hang out at Ueno park, which is Tokyo's most famous park - there's a bunch of nice looking shrines in there and it's generally a nice walk. I'm glad I spent three weeks in Korea before coming here - I'm a lot more comfortable now with getting around in places where almost no one speaks English. It was really easy to figure out the subway system, for starters, and once you're comfortable with that and know how to get around, the rest follows quite naturally.After strolling around Ueno Park for a while, I decided to check out the Tokyo National Museum - rather impressive. Spent about an hour or so there.

Then walked around a bit on some pretty darned crowded streets and bought some rice cakes from this guy who was baking them in a very neat looking machine. It was about 6 or so when I was done seeing Ueno so I figured I still had enough time left in the evening to go check some other place out before my legs died on me - hopped on the train to Akihabara, which is the electronics district of Tokyo. That was QUITE something - they were selling all sorts of stuff at crazy discount prizes. I think I even saw this place selling Sony PSP's for Y900, which is like $10!!! At least, the posters looked like that was the price, but I'm sure there was a catch somewhere. There had to be! Anyway, it was still fun to browse around. I spent something like an hour in an anime store and ended up buying two little anime action figure dolls.

By then the stores were beginning to think about shutting down, so I started hunting around for dinner. There was an australian burger place that a lot of tourists were heading to, but I wasn't about to settle for something quite that tame on my very first evening in Japan! Eventually I found this quite little "noodle soup bar" with rows of silent office workers eating quietly, and it looked like an interesting experience, so I walked in. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of those places which doesn't really have a picture menu but you buy a ticket from a vending machine and then give the ticket to the chef, who dishes out what you asked for. Which was all very fine for everyone else, but the vending machine didn't have a single English letter on it. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, staring at all the buttons and words, wishing that by some miracle, if I stared at it long enough and concentrated hard enough, the letters would magically make sense. Sigh. Eventually I gave up and decided to play Noodle Soup Roulette. Pushed in some money, closed my eyes, and hit out blindly. Voila! I had a ticket and NO IDEA in the world what I was going to get. I figured that noodle soup of any variety would be reasonably edible anyway, and if I didn't like whatever meat/seafood was in it, I could push that to the side and concentrate on the noodles. Which is what I eventually ended up doing - there were two or three different types of meat in there - crab, which I didn't mind, something like anchovies, which I don't like at all, and some third unidentifiable thing which I tried a small bit off and decided to let be. The noodles and the soup were awesome though and there was a LOT of that, so pushing the seafood to the side of the bowl wasn't a big deal at all. I felt at the end of it like I had ARRIVED in Tokyo, so it was fun!

Just got back to the ryokan - they've given me a kimono to wear while I'm indoors, so I feel all dressed up! The footwear rules are also pretty intense - you take your shoes off at the entrance of the ryokan and get into their "house slippers" before you get inside the building. You take these house slippers off though before you enter your tatami-mat covered room. Anytime you leave your room, you put your slippers back on. You take them off again when you enter the "bathing area" and put on special "bathroom slippers" which you absolutely SHOULD NOT be seen in outside the bathroom. Even the gardens have special "garden slippers"! It's all very complicated and I have to make a conscious effort to make sure that I'm not at any time in the middle of a serious social slipper gaffe, which I suppose would send me to footwear jail.

Anyway, am totally exhausted so that's about all for now. More later...
Need to find an internet cafe so that I can upload this onto the net. For all its tech city reputation, Tokyo has a serious shortage of WiFi networks. I can't find ANY!

Ten minutes later:
ACK!! My pillow is a "sand pillow" - the thing is filled with sand!! It's hard as a rock!! This is insane! Whatever happened to goosedown? Or any down, for that matter! Or heck, even cotton? Wool? Shredded cloth? Paper??

Day 2:

The sand pillow and I didn't get along at all. It spent the night ignominiously on the floor. It's going to stay there for the next couple of days.

Went to Harajuku today - checked out the Meiji Jingu shrine first - it's the most venerable shrine in Tokyo and dedicated to Emperor and Empress Meiji. Along the way, I washed my hands at a sacred well, took pictures of some royal fish in the imperial fishing pond, walked through the most gorgeous Iris Garden, saw what seemed to be the last bit of a Japanese wedding (though I'm not sure if it was an actual wedding or just something for the tourists to gawk at) and checked out all the lucky charms that they were selling near the shrines - charms for long life, good health, luck, wealth, traffic safety (yes, traffic safety - it must be an issue in Tokyo if they actually need to sell CHARMS for it).

After the shrine, I headed to Takeshita Dori, which is this pedestrian-only street where all the teenagers in Tokyo hang out on weekends. It's for sure a fun street - I spent hours browsing through these little boutique stores there, indulged in some absolutely wonderful chocolate and whipped cream crepes and generally did a ton of people watching - the street is full of kids dressed in the weirdest of fashions - the Goth look seems to be REALLY big in Tokyo, along with the other extreme of baby pink lace and frills, and there were plenty kids showing off absolutely bizarre outfits quite proudly. After that I got to this Oriental Bazaar, and bought a few souvenirs - not too many coz I'm beginning to reach suitcase limits here so I've switched into "heartbreak mode" (don't buy it unless it breaks your heart to leave it behind).

Hours and hours of walking and browsing and walking and people watching and walking and walking later, I'm back at the ryokan. But my phone detected a WiFi network around a nearby Starbucks, so I'm going to tote my laptop over there and see if I can log on.

An hour later: I don't believe this - Starbucks doesn't have its own WiFi network! There's some lame LiveDoor network here and I can connect to it but I can't browse until I enter a livedoor username password. And I tried signing up as a new user but the whole darned website is Japanese - I even ended up finding the sign up page by trial and error but then I got totally stuck because my laptop doesn't have the language pack for Japanese installed - so while I could kinda navigate if the links were images, I can't for the life of me figure out anything on the signup page because all I see are garbage characters. Bummer! I just spent fifteen minutes trying to fill in the signup form, but I'm doing something wrong because I keep getting an error (RED garbage characters). So foo this and I'm going to go back to Seattle and just upload all these blogs at the same time. Which will kinda defeat the purpose of them acting as an update to the world, but guess it can't be helped.

I miss Seattle's ubiquitous connectivity.

I'm going to do several things once I get back home:
1. Walk all over my apartment with my shoes on. These slipper rules are getting on my nerves.
2. Stand in the middle of Capitol Hill, turn on WiFi on my phone and BREATHE in the internet.
3. Call everyone I know - I need to let the GSM networks know I'm BACK!
4. Take my car out on a long drive. Drive across the 520 bridge several times.
5. Watch a movie at the theatre - I don't care what's playing - I'm sure I've missed out on several summer shows, so there'll be plenty to pick from.
6. Spend a day at the Elliot Bay bookstore - I miss bookstores - I've seen only Korean/Japanese bookstores in the last month and it hurts to walk past a shelf full of books and not be able to browse.

Do I sound a bit frustrated? I guess I am - I'm tired and totally cut off from everyone I know - and I can't even get on the NET! I mean, cut me off from my phone - fine! Ouch, but fine - I can live with that. Cut me off from the internet in general - BIG BIG BIG OUCH!!! I think I'll just go back to the ryokan and sleep. I've got Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" with me so I guess I'll read a bit of that. I think on some level, this could be a learning experience - like learning how people lived before the Internet existed.

Shucks!

How DID people live before the Internet existed??!?!?

Odds and Ends:

Cars drive on the left in Japan. Like in Britain.
Taxi doors open and close automatically - a taxi driver could get confused if you try and open them manually, since he's simultaneously hitting the buttons that control them.
Rain in Tokyo is oddly like Seattle's rain - the kind you can walk through. Still, everyone has umbrellas.
The internet is very very very elusive (yes, I've said this before. It's important enough to reiterate.)
There are almost no buildings older than 50 years ago - the city was almost entirely destroyed during air raids in World War II - even the old shrines and temples are all remakes of the originals and were built in the 1970s.
The public transport is spectacular - there's a subway system as well as a monorail system, and between the two, you can get anywhere at all in the city.

Day 3:

Woke up very early today and headed out around 7 to catch the morning activity at Tsukiji fish market - it's the largest such market in Asia, opens at 5 am with the day's fish cargo and is apparently all sold out by 9 am. It was pretty crazy - I've never seen so much seafood type stuff in one place - there were a million kinds of fish, clams, mussels, oysters, octopi (octopusses?), squid, crabs, shrimp, lobsters, eels, weird bug-like things with whiskers, long puffy sack like creatures and other bizarre unidentifiable creatures from unimaginable depths of the Pacific Ocean.

It was also the PERFECT location for a million sushi restaurants, so I decided to turn Japanese and have sushi for breakfast. I picked a place at random (it looked awfully crowded, so I figured it would be good) and walked in - it was a tiny little sushi bar and seemed family run. There was a set menu of soup, green tea, 8 pieces of different kinds of sushi and three rolls - I only identified the salmon. I think there was also tuna and mackerel. I'm not sure what everything else was. But it was crazy fresh and therefore extremely good. With just one problem - in Japan, apparently, they put the wasabi INSIDE the roll, so you can't control how much you get. And normally, just the slightest touch of wasabi is enough for me. But this chappie was putting a merry dollop inside each one of my rolls. So every bite went straight through my head and I had to spend several minutes recovering. I'm glad there were only 3 rolls - I couldn't have managed more of those. The regular sushi pieces were just fine, so I liked those a ton more.

After that, I walked over to the Hama Rikyu imperial gardens - they only opened at 9, so I had to spend a few minutes waiting at the gate, but I got to be the first person inside. Which was very very nice coz I pretty much had the whole place to myself - spent almost an hour just sitting by this very beautiful lake staring out at a rather picturesque tea house, thinking about life, the universe and everything. Note to self though - the next time, try NOT to be the first person in a garden. The solitude is gorgeous, but the first person in the garden is ALSO the first person to walk through all the spiderwebs strung across the pathways by busy arachnids through the night. Not pleasant.

After about an hour and a half there, I hopped on a boat to Asakusa, where I spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon checking out Sensoji Temple (Tokyo's oldest temple - the original was built in the 7th century - this one, of course, is only a copy, but it's still very beautiful. It's a pity so much of Japanese history was destroyed in 1945. Heck, it's a pity so much of the whole world was destroyed around then.

I also got a "fortune" letter - you put a 100 yen coin in a wooden box, and then shake another box until a long bamboo stick comes out, and the stick has a number written on it, so you find that number on a set of wooden drawers and take your fortune, written in both Japanese and English, out of the drawer. My fortune doesn't make much sense to me, but it was kinda funny all the same to go through the whole procedure - it goes "The black clouds on the moon were cleared up, it get really bright again. Just like the moon and stars shine clear, everybody have calm mind with nothing to regret or worry about." Which I suppose is good.


Then spent a bit of time browsing Nakamise Dori, which is a quaint little pedestrian-only street outside the temple, lined with stalls selling all sorts of crazy stuff - souvenirs, kimonos, old swords, antiques, clothes, shoes, more souvenirs, fans, etc, etc.

Got back to the ryokan a bit before 4 in the afternoon - I'm not sure if I want to head out again today - I'm just so awfully tired and a little sleepy too, having woken up so early today. I think I'll take it easy this evening and try and get some rest.

More later.

Day 3:

So the plan was to go to the Ghibli museum today but I think I planned badly - it's closed. Bummer. Things in Japan follow weird holiday schedules - some places are closed on Sundays, some on Mondays, some on Tuesdays - it's impossible to figure it out.

Oh well.

So I decided to come back to Takeshita street in Harajuku to have another one of those absolutely sinful crepes that I had on Sunday.

The place is much quieter today - not so many students and tourists hanging out - I guess coz it's a weekday. I think on the whole, I've done all the sightseeing I want to do - I'm getting a bit saturated now. So I'll probably just walk around this neighbourhood and explore randomly with no itinerary whatsoever. I'm carrying my laptop with my in case I stumble across a WiFi zone somewhere - unlikely, because even the Starbucks here in the middle of downtown (which is where I am right now) doesn't have a network. I keep looking to see if I can spot anyone else with a laptop in a cafe or something, but nope - no such luck.
Well, it doesn't matter much anyway now coz tomorrow I'll be back in Seattle.

Day 4:

Wednesday. Waiting at the airport....