(hand!)(the lights out!)(hand!)(right now!)(hand!)

Tokyo!!

2009-06-14T00:44:00.001-07:00

I spent five weeks in Tokyo two summers ago and fell unabashedly in love with the city. So, when the company I’m interning with offered to let me spend a week at either their Tokyo or London office, I jumped at the chance to visit again. Adam met me at the airport and we spent four days chilling in the city followed by a week of work for me.

I had somehow forgotten that no one in Tokyo speaks English and had incorrectly assumed that we could ask around Ginza Station to find the exact location of our hotel. You see, I used to think that the only reason I couldn't find anything in the city without using sights and subway stations as relative waypoints was because streets were only signposted in Japanese. But, it turns out that most streets in Japan don't even have names. Because of this, addresses in Japan mean very little. They generally include a neighborhood name and then three numbers that narrow it down to a single building without ever referring to a street. Google Maps is useless in Tokyo because it doesn't understand the system.

But! We found a sweet touch-screen guide-map inside Ginza Station that went as far as to tell us which exit to take out of the subway station to get to our hotel. (Note: This is not trivial. We were exit A13 from the selection of A1-A14 and B1-B10.) Go Japan.

Our room in the (first) hotel was absolutely tiny, something I wrote off as a genuine Tokyo experience. I'm not going to write much about most of the following four days because mostly I just wanted to make sure Adam knew where everything in the city is and a lot of it was a repeat of my trip two years ago: crazy Japanese virtual sports center in the Tokyo Dome, views from the 50th story of the Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku, "Lost in Translation" sightseeing in the Park Hyatt Hotel, walking around at night in the Times Square-crushing lights and crowds of Shibuya, conveyor belt sushi, shopping and anime-crazed people watching in Harajuku, old Tokyo and temples in Asakusa, wandering in the back alleys of residential Bunkyo-ku, pandas in Ueno Zoo, and a Yomiuri Giants baseball game in the Tokyo Dome.

We visited the main showrooms for Toyota, Nissan, and Honda. We saw a performance by ASIMO, a robot at Honda who actually runs (as in, both of his feet leave the ground at the same time), rode in a Toyota that drove itself around the compound, and saw a union protest at Honda.

We also saw a day of sumo. I don't have terribly much new insight to add to my writing from last time. No huge upsets/mat throwing this time, but somehow the sumo itself was more interesting. I think I'm getting to the point where I could watch it as a sport and not just a cultural experience. It's a great spectator sport and the crowd was predictably riled up.

On our last free day, we decided to shell out for tickets to a drifting competition. It was more than worth it. The track was entirely enclosed by eight sets of bleachers and was essentially a straightaway leading to a gentle 180-degree turn, followed by a series of increasingly sharp turns inside the curvature of the first turn. It was a very tight track and drivers predictably spun out and crashed into the walls more than once. The format of the competition was actually very clever and made drifting into a scorable sport. I had never really understood from “Fast and the Furious” how you were supposed to “race” when drifting. They had 32 drivers set up in a bracket. Each pair would drive twice, each driver getting to lead once. The second driver’s goal was to stay as close and as parallel as possible to the lead driver’s car through the turns. Clearly, this gave the first driver the incentive to drive as fast and recklessly as possible. It also set up scenarios where a particularly bad first run made drivers on their second runs get too aggressive and spin out/crash, or alternately, amazingly drift within inches of the other car through each turn. Judges scored the pair of runs. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The crowd was boisterous, the announcing was overblown in a campy way (think Japanese game show), exhibits included crazy car body kits and remote control cars that drift, and the campground food was both predictably greasy and predictably Japanese.

Then I went to work for five days.

I used our last night out to reminisce in Bunkyo, where I had lived two summers ago, and then Shinjuku, that neighborhood that had so thoroughly blown my mind my first night during that trip. In many aspects, Tokyo is just like every other worldly financial center (Hong Kong, London, NYC, etc.), but it really, truly, is a place of its own. Shinjuku perfectly embodies it for me. It’s bright, busy, shockingly seedy, completely inaccessible, and yet one of my favorite places in the world.

I had a really hard time writing this entry. I am so thoroughly convinced that Tokyo works as a place that I feel as though I have nothing specific to say about it. I cut a lot of this entry because of that. It sounded boring, even by the standards of this blog. So, all I’ll say is: go. It’s hard to convey Tokyo in one piece of writing because it’s all about small experiences, like having a woman leave her shop to walk you a block to the correct subway entrance. I think Adam’s movie of our trip will do a better job than I can. Here’s the trailer.

My walk in Shinjuku was two Fridays ago. Then, I was home for exactly 23 hours, and was in New York City by that Sunday night.

P.S. Watching Adam's trailer reminded me of something. In Ueno Zoo, in the worst zoo planning fail I've ever seen, they put the seals by the polar bears. Every time the seals made any kind of noise, the polar bears went nuts. I felt so bad for them.

Asia Retrospective - Part 1

2009-05-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. It took me three guesses to get the password to this blog right, but I finally found myself with internet and not much else to do so I figured I should try to catch up on at least a few of my last ten days in Asia. I can't get my camera to link to this computer correctly (mine crashed the day before I left the US), but at some point I'll upload pictures to go along with this post.

At least as a segue, I'll tell a few travel stories. I had the worst sandwich I've had in years at JFK. When flying from Terminal 1, you're better off starving. My flight from JFK to Tokyo (Japan Airlines) had cameras attached to the nose and bottom of the plane that you could view on the touchscreen in each seat. It was, at the time, "the newest thing I knew exists". (This is a concept mentioned by comedian CK Louis in this great interview. I really like the idea, and since (spoiler) I've spent the last few days in Tokyo, mine has changed a couple of times since.) Flying into Tokyo, we were subjected to 28 Days Later-style influenza screening procedures. It took me about 75 minutes to get off of my flight, even though I was transferring to a new international flight and not even entering Japan. Think blue hazmat suits, heat-imaging cameras, and lots of forms that insure you in their lovely Orwellian way that this is all for the sake of the health of you and your family. I was anxious during the entirety of our ascent for the Japan Airlines sound bite sampled by The Books in "Tokyo" -- It has been a great pleasure to have you aboard Japan Airlines. We hope you have enjoyed the flight and that we have another opportunity to serve you in the very near future. Thank you very much and for now, sayonara. -- and they said segments of the script, but not at one time. I listened to the song during quarantine to make up for it. At one point, the girl sitting next to me asked me if the Japanese were Communists.

I spent a few days in the Philippines visiting a very good friend from school and trying to relax as much as possible during my lone two weeks between finals and my internship. It worked incredibly well. Her family was amazingly hospitable and we had great programs lined up for my one week and great friends to do them with -- what follows below will invariably be a woefully inadequate summary.

Day 1 -- Taal Lake/Volcano/Volcano Lake

Lake Taal's island within a lake within an island (that is a volcano) within a lake within a HUGE crater was, as you might expect, gorgeous, but even given this, the whole day was much more of a "journey over destination" type deal: we rode a traditional Filipino boat across the lake, the first of many instance when I was On a Boat (everybody look at me) . Next, we rode horses up to the top of the volcano-within-the-lake. Local (I'm assuming) Filipino kids led our horses up the mountain. It was my first time on a horse this decade (I still think of the 2000's as a young decade. Silly, no?), leading my guide to say "balance, cowboy" every 50 yards or so. He discovered that old and fleeting nickname of mine quite quickly. My horse, Cindy, was slow but adorable. I'm sure it didn't help that I'm not quite a featherweight. My friends' horses, on the other hand, booked it up the mountain.

Days 2-5 -- Legazpi/Misibis

We flew from Manila to Legazpi (50 minutes -- up there with the other shortest flights I've ever taken: Orlando-Fort Lauderdale, College Station-Philadelphia, and Vienna-Budapest, all in the 200 mile range) and landed at the foot of a volcano that was described to me as, and is, a shockingly near-perfect cone. Given that Legazpi is a beach town, it was also surprisingly tall: 2000+ meters. There's no mountain range nearby, just a volcano. We were picked up by Mei, a hospitality person from our resort, taken to a nice sister-hotel for a half-Filipino, half-Western breakfast, and then to our surprise on an hour-long ride through a legitimate jungle that at required us more than once to drive off of the paved road and once onto a ferry. It was incredibly gorgeous and surprisingly mountainous: lots of lookouts and hairpin turns. (If this is your first time reading my blog, I usually at least attempt to replace these trite adjectives with pictures. I hate description and try to let the pictures tell their thousand words for me.) We were happy by the end however to get to our resort where we were greeted by a dance by the staff, fresh watermelon juice, and two beachfront villas. Over the next three days, we took ample advantage of Misibis' resources and kindness: we rode jet skis, horses and ATVs, the latter through a sequence of small villages up a mountain road, went banana boating, sunbathed, swam in the ocean, played with inflatables that were impossible to climb, went zip-lining (though it was less zip-lining than sliding down once a single zip-line), had long conversations over great dinners, and watched 1.5 Jurassic Park movies. My favorite though was a buggy (think souped up half go-kart, half ATV) ride up a riverbed to the foot of the lava flow of the volcano. The lava flow ended in a five-story wall, which we then got to climb. From the top, we could see the flow all the way to the top of the volcano, and we could see down to the sea. The flow was still steaming from a 2006 eruption. A picture will be coming, I promise. Also, we had a huge transportation win on day 4. Because the owner of Misibis was concerned that we hadn't seen a whale shark at Donsol on day 3 (see below), he told us to go again and to use the resort's helicopter to get there. Needless to say, it was sweet. We all firmly decided to at one point (mid-life crisis?) splurge on a helicopter. On the way back, we took a speedboat from Legazpi to Misibis. Choppy seas and light rain made it quite a ride. I'm on a boat and it's going fast and...

Days 3-4 -- Donsol

Even though these days overlap with Misibis, I think Donsol deserves its own entry if only because it was (ostensibly) the principal reason we were in the Bicol region. Lonely Planet calls it sleepy, but I'd call Donsol a bustling (if cute) fishing village. In either case, it is principally a fishing village, but for a few months of the year, international tourists swarm the town to watch and swim with whale sharks. (Aside: we had a good conversation about how a "whale shark" is considerably less terrifying than a "shark whale".) It seemed to us that we were a bit late to the 2009 season since on our first day out on the water, we saw no whales in our three hours. On our second day, in one of the most outrageous things to happen to us in a week of outrageous things, the helicopter helped us look for a whale. Still, no go, and we gave up in a little more than two hours. We did get decent tans though.

Our one last activity together was watching Twilight. I saw it in good (and obsessed) company so I had fun but I do now feel that I have the right to criticize the movie mercilessly. With that, on Wednesday, excitedly but remorsefully, I was off to Tokyo. My friends were going next to Boracay, the Philippine Ibiza, a legitimate isle of sin.

A Photoblog, Part 3: New York City 2008

2008-11-15T23:51:00.000-08:00

A Photoblog, Part 2: Spring Training 2008

2008-11-15T23:44:00.000-08:00

A usual audience at spring training: scouts (foreground) and the Marlins' owner (background, glasses):

A Photoblog, Part 1: Langerado 2008

2008-11-15T23:39:00.000-08:00

Terrible and/or offensive British advertising, part one!

2008-06-14T13:47:00.001-07:00

There is much, much more to come, including an ad that advertised a new best-selling novel as "Love, war, and....er, ninjas? Available only at WH Smith!"

Week 1: Part 2

2008-06-14T12:49:00.000-07:00

Last week was mostly dominated by me having to be at work by 6:45am-ish every morning, but I still managed to explore at least a little each afternoon. I actually did go through a bit of light culture shock...and still misunderstand people regularly. Especially grocery store cashiers. They just like mumble, and then speak like Welsh or something. I'm going to try to catch up to this weekend in either this post or the next so that my posts have some sort of actual substance and don't end up being travel picture slideshows because I'll remember more and won't have to jog my memory with pictures...but don't expect much more than that in this one.

I usually just write articles for my job in the office but twice this week, I was sent on "field reporting trips", once to check if there had been a bank run that morning on a UK bank that had effectively crashed, and the second time to see if a developer that had lost something like 95% of its stock value in the last 12 months was continuing construction on its unfinished projects. The answers were no and yes respectively -- convincing me that people here panic a lot less easily than in the states. I like it. I also think that the second company, Barratt, is probably an awesome investment right now.

One of these nights, I ventured into Regent's Park, which despite being only four blocks away, was incredibly hard to find. This was because someone had told me that it was three blocks away. This might sound trivial, but it made all the difference because on the third block, I decided that I had probably missed the park south, turned right, and ended up behind an apartment building that faces the park, and continues down the road parallel to it for something like a mile.

But yeah, I found it finally. It's pretty.

Especially the ridiculous rose garden, where the roses are arranged by color, and then by the place from where the Queen acquired it, or the name of the foreign dignitary who gave it to her. It's a cool British twist.

London is small by the way, especially after Tokyo, which is unbelievably gigantic. My walk to, around, and back from Regent's took a bit less than an hour, and I passed six different subway stops along the way. Also, we accidentally walked to Trafalgar Square a few days ago from Covent Garden...which on a map seems like halfway through the city. I don't really know how it compares to Manhattan but distances aren't appreciably larger.

We spent a couple hours in the British Museum doing the "must sees" and deciding that it really would take weeks to adequately do the museum in its entirety. We were kind of perversely lucky that the lower floor was closed. I had never before realized how georgeous the Rosetta Stone is. The text is carved flawlessly...it's touchingly pretty, and would be even without being one of the most important historical objects ever. Also, we went on founder's day! They performed Regency-era (Austen-esque?) dances in the main hall. As I've learned with Regency-era dancing twice now, it's novel for like five minutes and then gets very boring very quickly.

We also went looking for the crystal skull (from Indy IV), which apparently is in the museum somewhere. We thought that this turquoise-covered human skull (creepy, pretty) was it and I just found out today that it's not. I'll be going again anyway!

Travel slideshow!:

This is my favorite of the many, many puns I've seen on Kentucky Fried Chicken. Another was the "Kebabs and Fried Chicken".

I love the small British side streets. They're all over the place, lead into enclosed squares and neighborhoods where it's impossible to have cars. This is Faulkners Alley:

If I ever become a rapper, I'll be The Viscount Slim:

Drinking on the tube has not stopped at all, apparently:

The BT Tower is one of the tallest buildings in London and used to be its token "see the city from the air" tourist attraction until someone apparently threatened to blow it up. Now it's locked behind this concrete barrier. It was hard to find even though you can see it from almost all of Western London because all the streets close to it are narrow so it's hard to look up. Oh, and this is my summer roommate.

This is for Ian:

Week 1: Part 1

2008-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I tried to walk to the place I work to decide if
1. I could walk it in the mornings instead of taking the tube. (40 minutes -- no)
2. I could find the office in the first place since I didn't have a precise address. (no)
3. Get my head around the geography of the area. (kind of)

What I mean about 'geography' is this. The closest tube station to my office is Blackfriars. Try guessing the second closest one on this tube map: http://www.cloud9radio.com/images/LondonTube_map.gif

Well, anyway, it's Farringdon.

It was a good walk though. Along the way, I found a square where Virginia Woolf and other writers used to live and write their books together in a park, saw a street fight that was eventually ended by an old lady waving a broom and yelling that she had called police, and saw Dickens’ house:

And also an aptly named college:

And the very Columbia-esque University College of London:

And St. Paul's Cathedral, where I wandered into evensong, which is a night mass conducted entirely (at least the portions I heard) by the chorus. It was charming...and free, which is unfortunately a complete rarity in London. I'll take a tour to climb into the dome at one point. I also now eat lunch on the steps of the cathedral most days:I love the double-deckers and I'm starting to get to the point of familiarity with the city where I'm learning which bus routes are faster than tube routes -- the two systems are supposed to be complimentary after all. I took a bus cross-town to ride past some touristy places until I saw what I thought was a political rally or speech on Trafalgar Square so I frantically got off the bus... ...and then I realized that the large crowd (I didn't take a picture that really does it justice -- I'd guess it was thousands) was watching a film version of a recent production of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Opera. Unreal, this would never happen in the U.S.

Then past Whitewater Lane, Big Ben (my favorite piece of architecture in the world, I think), Parliament, and Westminster Abbey -- the facade of which has statues of 20th century martyrs, including Martin Luther King Jr. It was a bit crazy seeing him on the 11th century cathedral...

I think I probably went home at this point and freaked out about my job the next day.

Oh, and what a badass:

2008-06-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write an epic one-week catch-up post tomorrow, but for now, let me introduce the beginnings of my 'blogring':

Priscilla blogging from Paris at http://jheartparis.blogspot.com/
Mary from Geneva at http://themapplease.blogspot.com/
Chelsea from Paris at http://scientifiqueadventures.blogspot.com/
Julian from Denver at http://armyofprinciples.wordpress.com/

It’d be awesome if the rest of you at least gave it a shot!

I've been putting off posting because I thought that airport security stole my hard drive, which apparently happens pretty regularly. They're allowed to take hard drives out of luggage and 'inspect' their content, which of course means you never get it back. This put off my posting because both my camera and cell phone USB cords were with my hard drive --- but I just found them! So, tomorrow, promise.

2008-05-31T16:47:00.001-07:00

I got into Gatwick at 6am yesterday, took a train into the city, found my apartment (which is huuuge), got a UK SIM card, tried to find food that didn't cost an obscene amount (hard), took a nap, and then the day got more exciting...

...because we met these kids from Vanderbilt who had spent spring semester here and they told us that a ban on alcohol on London public transportation was going into effect at midnight, which of course meant that there was going to be a huge party on the Underground...

...and so we went. We started at Euston Square Station, about a block from our apartments and waited, as instructed, for the first Circle Line train. The first few cars were empty until, out of nowhere, one of the cars was rush-hour+ packed and they all started yelling and cheering once they saw us. The party moved from car to car together as the cars got hot. There was lots of chanting...like one where someone started going "no adverts on the tube! no adverts on the tube!" and started tearing down and taking ads. At one point, a kid getting out of train missed the door, hit a wall, and fell face first out of the car onto the platform. Someone else tried peeing between cars before someone stopped him, saying he'd be electrocuted.

The Circle Line took forever to go around, plus the police had by then closed Euston Square for "overcrowding", so a bunch of us followed a group of kids yelling "To the Thames! To the Thames!" and got off a bit early, went to the Thames, and then took a shorter tube line back. Apparently, we missed the party subway cars being rerouted onto another line, then getting to a station where the cops started yelling "emergency! emergency!" and making everyone leave the station.

I guess this is more or less going to be the most insane thing I will have seen in London.

And now it's on BBC Europe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7429661.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7429638.stm

2008-05-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

I like how this is starting. I register for MEDEX and the first screen I get is:

2008-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

I changed a movie while coming home from school about a week ago.

Walking out of Grand Central with two pieces of rolling luggage and a suit, it took me a few seconds to realize that the taxi line had been moved about a hundred yards to the right to what seemed like a permanent taxi stand. I got in line but the taxis seemed thoroughly uninterested in picking up the people in the line -- I figured this was because NYPD was blocking 42nd and Park with three flashing cars in an impassable triangular formation.

At this point, a man with a headset walks up to me, and asks "are you an extra?" I say no. He looks disappointed, and says "too bad, you look real. You're traveling right?" He turns on his microphone and asks if they happen to have any rolling bags or suits for the extras in the taxi line.

It's called "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3" and it's a remake about a fictional hijacking on the 6 line. By the way, I think a lot of the people stuck in the traffic created by the blockade had no idea what was going on. There wasn't a particularly visible movie set-up -- I didn't see lights or cameras -- and a lot of the drivers were definitely angrily checking their watches.

I actually almost always take the E train to JFK instead of a cab or the Long Island Railroad but I'm glad that I twice recently had to take cabs. I love driving through Queens, especially past Shea. As much as I hate the Mets, driving past Shea -- and being impressed by its and Flushing Meadows' spacious grandour -- is one of the first thing I remember about the states. It brought back some good memories.

P.S. The travel blog will be back on in full force this summer from England, France, Italy, and Hungary.

2008-04-18T00:53:00.000-07:00

I have had a surreal last 36 hours at Yale.

It's stupid but it has reminded me of something I once saw written about music:

"The fact that the music is so paradoxically life-affirming and euphoric makes it much easier to write, what now feel like, trite hyperboles."

And so I won't. But I'll leave you with a picture, not taken today:

The Tale of Three Towers in Tokyo

2007-08-05T03:08:00.000-07:00

I forgot the photograph of this small, asymetrical building in the middle on Shinjuku. It's one of those cases where it took me a few seconds to decide what the architect, developer, and construction company were thinking. Honestly.

Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills is a shopping mall. Why did we go? Because of awesome architecture, another observation deck (this time on the other side of the city), and a modern art museum on the 53rd floor, above the observation deck.

The developer's eccentricity was on display everywhere. A huge spider arches over one of the entrances into the main building:

This is a spiral staircase leading up into the "Tokyo Hat", which is the entrance to the elevators which took us up to the 52nd floor:

The Mori Art Museum has changing exhibitions, but we got lucky with one of Le Corbusier, the Belgian architect famous mostly for his "city of tomorrow" designs for the city of Paris that incorporated highways, high-rises, and residential parks long before any of these three ideas really existed. Although plenty of his paintings and architecture drawings were on display, the best exhibits were his designs for a cheap three-seat car (built before cars were thought of as toys for the rich) and complete to-scale reconstructions of his personal apartment in Paris, his beach cottage on the Riviera, and design for workforce housing on the Riviera. Even his beach cottage, a whopping 15 feet by 15 feet big, was planned so well that it was almost cozy. My favorite drawing was where he supplemented a design of a building with a drawing of a salamander and a crossed-out drawing of a grasshopper.

More observation deck photos:

Roppongi skyline with more skylines (Ginza maybe) behind:

Looking toward Odaiba. I'm including this photo just because the Fuji TV tower is in this photo, directly above the bridge over the Sumida River:

Some height perspective:
The aquarium is such a good call, but it would be so much cooler if the tanks were actually in the windows:
I still find it hard to believe that the Tokyo Tower (i.e. red Eiffel Tower) is actually a symbol of Tokyo. We were watching a video the other day that used the Tokyo Tower as a representation of Tokyo in a cartoon segment about international finances. It took me about a minute to realize they were not talking about Paris:

P.S. The post title will make sense next time.

Tokyo 4

2007-08-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I'm now starting to realize that the my visits to these places are starting to be crazy out of order. It'll be more fluent once I catch up again.

Ryogoku
I spend a solid ten minutes trying to find the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which was supposed to be near the exit of the subway station. The only help I had was the description "exactly the height of historic Edo castle." Well, it turned out to be literally above the subway station, and was shaped nothing like the castle. It was a two story building supported on two legs to a height of five stories above a barren, concrete plaza. I think the entire point of this was to match the height. The museum had thousands of displayed items, but I think I found a few worth seeing, including the hand-written imperial declaration for the start of the Manchurian War, a working press minting early 20th century Japanese novels, and an interactive map showing the areas of Tokyo that burned down during WWII. With a few exceptions, it's just about all of Tokyo. It's actually kind of frustrating because every historical area of Tokyo is denoted as: "Here stood some (pre-1945 era) temple/castle/neighborhood. It burned down during WWII. Now, it's a shopping mall/high-rise."

More Shinjuku
I took these pictures from the 47th story observatory of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. Somehow it's become an urban legend that it's the tallest building in Japan. It's not even the tallest in Tokyo, but the central, and free, observatory was nice during the day:
A huge park in the distance:
The density of buildings blows me away, it's even more pronounced from above:
I tried to find the Japanese sword museum, which turned out to be hidden in the mazelike residential area above. They only had about a hundred swords, but the historical data (name of warrior, name of swordmaker, period, etc.) and the incredible inscriptions of dragons and kanji on the swords made it a worthwhile visit. There were some non-sword warrior items too, but I could not figure them out. Leaving Shinjuku, I met up with a few people from my class to do the transportation museum, complete with a Shinkansen simulator and a room-size electric train set. As a testament to our complete lack of Japanese, we waited ten minutes for a cashier before realizing that the museum was closed until October. Oops.

More Ginza

Ginza is the home of all of the fancy department stores with the food floors in the basement that I had mentioned before. I decided to try the roof of a few of them this time. One of them had a small golf driving range, a garden, and pet shop. One specific type of fish cost about $1500.

My destination was the Sony Building: six floors of displays of all of the newest Sony products and concepts. Although all of the laptops, cameras, and such were nicer and better than ones I had seen in stores (even Akihabara), the most impressive display was what is now a trite concept: a wireless integrated room. The room's TV, speakers, and PlayStation3 were set up seamlessly and worked quickly and beautifully. I hate to say this, but imagine it as if Apple built a living room. The top floor of the building was so hidden that I was almost convinced it was closed. It was planned by an Italian designer using only Sony products and had its share of awesome set ups. In one part of the room, he used four "designer" speakers, one a frame, two hanging, and one a vertical tube, to create a spatial orchestra. It worked.

Outside the building is the Godzilla statue. Getting it to this scale required kneeling but the office buildings around were a good backdrop. Plenty of Japanese people were doing the same thing.

Tokyo Dome City

I finally went to go see a baseball game. The Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants were playing the Yokohama Bay Stars. Although it was a weekday night, since Yokohama is close, it was a near capacity crowd in the 50000+ seat Tokyo Dome and the cheering was split about 50-50. The guy leading the Yokohama cheers was sitting directly behind me. Most fans had noisemakers and the chanting was non-stop. Every single strike was greeted by cheers. I rooted for both teams. It was a pretty satisfying, if boring, way to watch the game. The quality of baseball was quite a bit worse than in the major leagues. There were a few errors, but the baserunning mistakes were even more glaring. Yokohama was up 5-0 when I left, shortly after what seemed to be a monster Yokohama grand slam into the back row of seats. They displayed the distance on the home run, and it would have been a fly ball in the Marlins' stadium in Miami. The other interesting difference was in the way they set up the batting orders: their weakest hitters batted second and third, and their strongest batted fourth, fifth, and sixth. I guess this could imply a hate for small ball, but both teams were doing it, so it might be a Japan league thing. In the U.S., the worst batting positions are almost always eighth and seventh (not counting the pitcher). The roof of the stadium is supported only by air pressure inside the stadium. It is a light material, but there are still speakers hanging from it:

These fans draped the flag over the entire section. Not the best view, but it shows spirit, I guess.

Tokyo 3

2007-07-31T03:09:00.000-07:00

Imperial Palace

I saw a list of jokes about having been in Japan for too long that included "you call anything with a tree a park." It's true that there are thousands of small shrines and pocket parks everywhere. The parks are usually literally a tree, a bench, and sometimes grass. I walked past this shrine on the street we live a few dozen times before noticing it:

At the same time, Tokyo also has a few massive parks. We've been to a few, most recently the Imperial Palace. No one's allowed inside the central moat, much less into the actual Imperial Palace, but we walked around on the grounds and in the gardens until finally catching a glimpse of the palace:

Tokyo by the way doesn't really have very tall buildings. I haven't seen many smaller than four or six stories, but the tallest building in Tokyo is only sixty stories (Sunshine 60). It's a good call after all: an illustration at the 47-story Tokyo Metropolitan Tower showed how much it bends and twists during an earthquake, and, well, it's a lot. The concentration of medium-height skyscrapers still gives some impressive skylines:
At this point, we were told to leave even this spot because some Imperial Family function was about to happen, but while searching for a subway stop, we accidentally found the Japanese Diet, their equivalent of Congress. I honestly can't tell what they were going for with the architecture. The closest I can get is 33% Roman, 33% Oriental, 34% Egyptian.

Ginza

I've been told that one of the quintessentially Japanese experiences is Kabuki, Japanese theatre in which only men play, at Kabuki-za, the most famed theatre in Japan. We saw the third act of Twelfth Night. This western twist ended up being a blessing since I had just seen it at Yale and understood at least a little of what was happening. The highlight was watching the man playing Viola, who in the play is a girl disguised as a boy but before the ending reveals her true identity.

We later found a department store that had a food floor. They made everything on the spot, from dumplings (below) to sushi to chocolates. We ate our dumplings in front of an office building under some modern structure.

P.S. The incredible smooth and on-time trains in Tokyo are operated manually. I thought this was crazy. Appearantly a subway train crashed a few years ago because the driver was trying to catch up to his timetable while running a full minute behind.

P.S.2. From the back of Lonely Planet:

"Maybe it's wondering through the flashing forest of neon in Shibuya and Shinjuku. Sushi for breakfast at the Tsukiji Fish Market. A shopping trip in Harajuku to check out the independent designers. Or maybe it's as simple as a bowl of whisked green tea in a centuries-old garden. Wherever you find your Tokyo moment..."

I guess I'm done. Admittedly, I'm still missing one thing from their "essential Tokyo" list: a nighttime river cruise in the city.

Tokyo 2

2007-07-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

I didn't explain in the last post why exactly I was alone for this lengthy day of exploring. I had been kind of sick the night before so I didn't go out to Roppongi with everyone else the night before. Some of their stories are worth telling: John ended up taking a cab home but didn't have enough Yen so he paid him in dollars, ran away, and hid in bushes. Cain and Will independently decided to try to walk back from Roppongi to our dorm (probably a two hour walk) without a map. This might sound kind of silly, but it's made even worse by the facts that:

a. Tokyo has a single straight street. Literally.

b. Even if they had maps, street signs are all in kanji.

They both got hopelessly lost and got on the subways in the morning at points farther from home than Roppongi. Needless to say, the group was unconscious until late in the afternoon.

All right, so after Shibuya, it continued:

Omote-sando

I haven't quite cleared up whether Harajuku is in, or next to, Omote-sando, but either way, it was my second time here. I was back to visit one place specifically, the Spiral Building, which Lonely Planet had recommended as one of the most famous architectural spots in Tokyo. I imagined something akin to the Chicago Spire, but I was completely off. The building was named after a spiral ramp inside, but the whole of the interior had an elegant twist to it, the windowed roof being slightly off-center from the floor of the atrium below. I didn't even know it was a gallery, but current Japanese artists were displaying their recent works. I listened to them talk in Japanese to other Japanese visitors. It was enlightening in a strange lost in translation kind of way. Hand motions helped. My favorite piece was a mechanical display that used an eyepiece and frames to show a cutout climbing Escher stairs. I liked this too, mostly because it was cute:

Bunkyo-ku
It took me until now to realize that our subway stop, Hongo-sanchome, means something like Hongo-3rd-intersection. The above picture is the sign for Hongo-4-chome. The times admittedly get a bit fuzzy here, but I think this was the next morning. We were planning on heading out somewhere but while the others were stalling with something, I ended up walking around the residential neighborhood closest to University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku. It was all little alleys, wooden houses in old Edo style, hundreds of bicycles, and many locals who were stunned that a gaijin had walked off the polished parkways of Tokyo. The buildings hugging Kasuga-dori and Hongo-dori, the two main streets in the area are lined by mostly six story buildings, but immediately behind them lay a more intimate and even sleepy Tokyo:

I found the Bunkyo-ku museum by complete accident in these back streets. I paid the 100 yen entry fee out of complete curiosity, but it well paid off. Edo-era Bunko-ku handrawn maps and compete reconstructions were supplemented by random objects such as Japanese children's books (below), letters, and one of the two-handled train service cars that I had never seen outside of cartoons until now.

P.S. I thought it was pretty sweet that Tokyo is in the running for the 2016 summer olympics, but the Todai kids told me that there is essentially no public support, especially from college-aged youth who think it's a waste of money to promote Tokyo in this way. I guess it kind of makes sense but I had never before heard of such a consensus rebuttal of a bid before.

Tokyo

2007-07-23T06:53:00.001-07:00

We've had classes every day since coming back from Nagoya, other than on the weekend, so explorations have been brief and restricted to Tokyo. I've realized over these last few days that Tokyo is very much of a day city. All museums and most stores close at 6pm or 7pm, with a few closing as late as 10pm. This will probably prove to be a blessing in disguise since I do have to do classwork at some point, but for now it's a tad frustrating, especially since we have class during the day. The visits to these neighborhoods were spread out over the last five days, in order:

Ikebukuro

I stopped by at the Tokyo Dome on the way to Ikebukuro, mostly to play in the batting cages. The place is frequented by teenagers and businessmen in suits relaxing on their way back from work. Some of the kids are great at baseball, but most of the businessmen are not. I'm impressed by anyone who can make consistent contact with 110+ km/h pitches, especially since I discovered that these batting cages pitch all over the strike zone, and even pitch balls occasionally. I realized this after swinging at one that was about a foot above my head. The crowds were heavy for a Thursday night, leading me to realize that it was the night before the Japanese baseball all-star game, which is at the Tokyo Dome!

My destination in Ikebukuro was Sunshine City, a sprawling shopping complex which includes Sunshine 60, one of the tallest buildings in Asia. It was a pretty long walk from Ikebukuro Station, so I did get distracted at a few places along the way. I finally gave in and bought Japanese shirts with English (Engrish?) writing, including: "BABY COMBAT It watches all the time my love" and "PHAT NOISE It happening."

Japanese department stores put U.S. ones to shame, except, maybe, the New York Macy's. The biggest department store in Tokyo has 28 floors. I stopped by at Tokyu Hands Ikebukuro, which is the annex store of the third biggest department store in Tokyo. It was pitched to me as a glorified Japanese Home Depot, someplace to go to see how Japanese homes are furnished. It was not a bad description but just about anything I would have found at Home Depot was on floors 6 and 7 of the 8-floored monstrosity. They even had a floor dedicated to pets, and a separate half-floor for wedding preparations. I walked the length of every floor, resisting the temptations:

-Rubik's cube alarm clock? No.

-Frog-shaped smiling spatula? No.

-Animal-shaped rubber bands? At this point, I caved.

I took the world's second fastest lift, complete with Space Mountain-esque music and stars projected onto its sides, to the top of Sunshine 60, a trip which was worth every yen*. The sun had set at this point, so I was not going to see Mount Fuji, but I did get to see Tokyo at night, and lights went to the horizons in every direction. The sheer density is incredible (the average building height in Tokyo has to be at least six stories), but there are noticable "downtowns." At one point to the East, the city hits a wall of skyscrapers: Ginza, Roppongi, and Shibuya. To the South is Shinjuku, and to the west, the darkest of the four sides and ironically the direction of my best picture is the rest of Ikebukuro:

There was one window on each side where I could walk up on a platform and press against the glass. I've done the glass-floors thing at the TV tower in Calgary, but this was a surprisingly harrowing experience, partially due to the height and partially because I imagined the activity and insanity going on below me on the highways and in the lights.

My last planned stop was Namjatown, a Disney-esque indoor amusement park owned by the Arcade giant Namco. The atmosphere reminded me a bit of Odaiba in that it was all elaborately planned, detailed, and decorated, but felt very empty. Luckily for them, the problem wasn't a post-boom decade, but that I was there on a Thursday night. Their chief attraction is "Gyoza Stadium", a floor with dozens of vendors who make 1001 different versions of pork dumplings. Not being able to read Kanji, all I know is that I had some spicy Chinese variant.

I misread the clock at this point and thinking it was 10pm, I left Namjatown. Since it was only 9, I had time to spend an hour at HMV and listen to J-Pop! This ended up being a bit frustrating since even if I found a band I liked, I couldn't find the band names, and CD's began at ~2800 yen, which is about $24. There is an obvious fascination with western music as well, and most interestingly, it's not with single artists, but with western music as a genre. I've been to a few record stores and only HMV marked records by genre. In most places, the western sections will have Ne-Yo, Bon Jovi, and the Arcade Fire next to each other in one category. This is true for Japanese music too (even at HMV), leading me to turn on records at random listening stations to find something I liked.

Grillz:

Ueno

I was transferring stations here (close to the Amoyoko Arcade) and found a 100 yen store. Most of the products were standard dollar store fare, but there were some standout Japanese things (Hello Kitty pencils, etc.) as well as, I am completely serious, headphone-jack speakers for my iPod and a headset for my cellphone. I did not buy a headset since I had already bought one in the U.S. for $29. :(

Subway station transfers are incredibly annoying in Tokyo since their definition of a station with line transfers is something like "it's kind of walkable". Most of them are tied by underground tunnels, but some of them, particularly JR-to-metro transfers can be outside transfers, which can even require knowing where the stations are. This is just about the only glitch in a really convoluted system - the Tokyo subway system is owned by different companies. I know of at least three (one of which is JR, or Japan Rail, the only one with mostly above-ground lines). The only other issue tends to be that new tickets have to be bought when transferring between companies. We're starting to learn where the cheap intra-company transfers are. Given this nonsense, the trains are always on time, and the times of arriving trains are displayed digitally. We've seen a single train arrive a minute late only once. Making this even more impressive is the fact that the trains are controlled manually by the conductors.

Akihabara

I went back here to buy a new camera since my old one only works occasionally now. Although everyone in Japan learns English until at least the seventh grade, I ended up buying my camera from a store without a single English-speaking employee. After "can I see it?" was misinterpreted as "Casio", the entire transaction was conducted by pointing. It was pretty sweet.

Shibuya

Among the people in my class, we've turned a few Japanese words into our own slang: sumimasen (Japanese for sorry or excuse me) has become a verb, as have shinkansen and Shibuya. Umbrellas are really cheap in Japan, and with good reason. Appearantly it is fair game to take any umbrella from an outside rack (taking them inside even a convenience store is impolite) if it has started raining. This is the origin of our sumimasen, such as in "Just sumimasen it." Shibuya has become our synonym for something crazy or exciting, but our impressions of this neighborhood have all come from nighttime adventures so I decided to visit it during the day, when it would be less packed and crowded.

This would turn out to be a false hope:

I had three concrete destinations in mind: Cisco, Uniqlo, and Hachiko. Cisco is a used-record store that is supposedly a weekly must-visit for local DJs. It would turn out to be the single sketchiest place I've been in Japan. Uniqlo is the only affordable place to buy clothes in Japan and my only hope for buying anything resembling Japanese fashion. I succeeded, buying two shirts for a thousand yen apiece that were designed by a wood-block artist. Next door was a store that sold shirts for upwards to 12,000 yen - the equivalent of $110. Hachiko is a statue of a dog that waited at Shibuya station for his owner, a professor, to come back from work every afternoon for five years. After the professor died, Hachiko came back every afternoon for ten more years. It has become a city-wide symbol of loyalty and is a common meeting place in Shibuya.

This street performer was attracting a considerable crowd:

This puts me in the early afternoon on Friday. There will be a part two.

*Pun kind of intended:

Since vending machines don't accept them, most totals are charged in 10-yen increments, taxes are included in prices, and people don't tip or bargain, 1 Yen coins and 5 yen coins are pretty much worthless here. I have fallen in love with the fact that clerks don't freak out at exact change, and even better, don't freak out when I do something like pay 122 yen for a 72 yen purchase. In the U.S., they would have just taken the 100 yen coin, telling me that that's enough. I've been trying to keep as little change as possible by paying for purchases in exact totals like that, and it has worked wonderfully until today when I finally made a mistake by paying 1011 yen for a purchase of 546 yen. The clerk gave me a quizzical look, but took it, and gave me my change. This has come up frequently because we have a 24-hour convenience store on our first floor which stocks everything from Manga to warm food to concert tickets.

P.S. I started a new blog a day or two ago to post news stories (and sometimes music) that I find online and want to show people. I felt it would be out of place here. It's at:

http://bluepastels.blogspot.com/

Catching Up: Part 8. (Nagoya day two)

2007-07-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

Our professor used to be a member of the Japanese Prime Minister's cabinet and so has plenty of Japanese connections. He somehow met the chairman of Toyota, who then invited our entire class to tour Toyota headquarters and one of the Toyota factories! This is the reason we were going to Nagoya, a two-hour trip from Tokyo, in the first place.

We had a formal sushi lunch with two vice presidents where they told us about the company (surprisingly revealing information about declining domestic sales, etc.) and engaged us in a lively question and answer session. I asked about Formula 1 (which they admitted has essentially no present benefit for the company other than for its image) and also asked which company they considered their biggest rival. A bunch of us thought they dodged the question, but because Toyota is so domineering of a car company, I liked their answers. One said he was worried about electric companies because they could easily compete in a fuel cell market of the future. The other said he thought it was Nintendo because young Japanese no longer save up for cars as quickly, partially leading to the decline (or at least stagnation) in their domestic sales.

We then spent about an hour in the Toyota showroom (of the near future) where they gave us a display of two of their robots: the trumpet playing Toyota Partner Robot and a large wheelchair kind of robot that recognized who was sitting in it, worked as transportation, would follow its user if she was walking, and could turn into a four-wheel car that could travel at 45 mph. They were both really, really impressive. The trumpet player (and otherwise domestic helper) goes on sale in a few years and the wheelchair-car is on target between 2015 and 2030. It let us to have a conversation as to whether science fiction notions of the future influence design or the other way around:

There were a good number of today-ready innovations on display as well, including a radar-enabled cruise control that slowed the car whenever another car was in front, an improved Prius, and my favorite, a car that could make a full rotation in place:

We were not allowed to take pictures in the factory itself. It was taken so seriously that John got chased down and had to erase the pictures from his camera. As soon as we walked in, we were on top of a welding area where twelve cars would simultaneously be worked on by 14 robots each. At our height, completed chassis and doors were being shuttled around from welding to assembly. The total cacophany of construction and machinery was unlike anything I had ever seen (even the Boeing factory where the pace seemed almost leisurely). The only actual person we saw in this section of the factory was repairing a robot. The second section was the assembly section where actual employees were assembling the more delicate parts of the cars. We saw the door assembly up close and it was a lot different that I had imagined: instead of a lot of people on an assembly line, each accomplishing one small task, one person would do a whole chain of things and move along with the doors down the assembly line. Making this process even more difficult was the fact that three separate models were manufactured on the same line so the workers would have to get their directions from the note on the door. In the words of someone in our group: "It seems a bit unfair. The first guy put in the window and the second assembled the door." We then saw the inspection area where every car, every single one, was taken for a performance test drive (a bit like an abbreviated version of Test Track in Epcot). They checked the interiors too, horns included. It must get incredibly annoying since no one wore earmuffs. One of the coolest things about the factory was that since almost all of the parts are manufactured and allocated locally, no single part sits on the factory floor for longer than two hours. Even the amount of cars of each model manufactured varies on a daily basis based on demand. Since they can manufacture different models on each line, the lack of demand for one model doesn't shut an assembly line down. It's clever. The factory we toured manufactured one of the Scions, the Prius, and the Camry.

P.S. Isn't this a cool highway?

P.S.2. Sumo videos as promised:

1. Intimidation period

2. An actual match

Catching Up: Part 7. (Nagoya day one)

2007-07-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

We took Shinkansen to Nagoya early in the morning and went directly to the grounds of the Nagoya Castle where the Nagoya sumo tournament had already begun. There are six sumo tournaments across Japan in a year, each lasting fifteen days. The Nagoya tournament is the only one in the summer and we were lucky enough that our scheduled tour of the Toyota factory (see Part 7) fell into the fifteen days. We got to the stadium around 1pm and watched the amateur sumo wrestlers until about 4pm, when the higher ranked matches begun. At first we thought it was silly to have gotten there so early, but although the higher ranked matches were much more exciting, the lower ranked matches were more unpredictable and less formulaic. There is obviously a lot of tradition in sumo, but one of the most enduring is that the higher ranked wrestlers are given "intimidation time" in which they can stare each other down, throw salt on the ring, rile the crowd, and repeatedly walk off before starting the bout. It was really fun, but it kind of took forever, so we were there until 6:30pm.

I do have a video of one match but YouTube is down (honestly). The last match between one of the two Yokozunas (highest ranking of sumo wrestler, only 38 have been awarded this title ever, there are currently two) and the only other undefeated wrestler was incredible. At the end, the Yokozuna was upset and the crowd threw their purple tatami mats into the ring (we had stadium style seats in the nosebleeds but most of the better seats had mats). Both an upset and the mat-throwing are extremely rare - and were great caps to a day of sumo.

At night we had noodles, our professor had sake, we held mock sumo matches in our hotel room, and watched Battle Royale, which by the way, is completely ridiculous.

Catching Up: Part 6. (Harajuku)

2007-07-19T06:38:00.001-07:00

Appearantly the Japanese earthquake was a bigger news internationally than here - although this is probably because I don't speak Japanese and can't read the newspapers! We were outside our dorm building, ready to head to Harajuku, around 9am on Monday when someone asked "who just pushed my chair?" We felt the ground sway for a few seconds (it was pretty cool) and the doors rattled indoors, but we wrote it off as a small tremor until we noticed in Tokyo Station, where we were switching trains, that a few national train lines had shut off for the day due to track damage. The epicenter was more than a hundred miles from Tokyo so any and all damage (such as the nuclear reactor leak - brilliant choice of location, right?) was far from here. We didn't even think of calling our parents until we found out that the earthquake registered at 6.8 at the epicenter. It was around 3.0 here. Interestingly, Nara, where we had spent Saturday, registered a 5.4 the same day, which would have definitely shaken us up a bit too.

We got lost on the way to Harajuku and ended up in some kind of city park where kids were racing around a track on bikes without pedals. We figured it was the Japanese version of training wheels, but still a tad bizarre:

Harajuku is a busy upscale shopping district (we found a $2000+ leopard print bra), but is more famous for "Harajuku girls" - girls who dress up and cos-play their favorite anime characters. They make their own costumes and loved the attention from us gaijin so they gladly posed in pictures. With the exception of one old and slightly creepy cowboy, they were actually all girls. The only other exception was a guy who danced to and sung various English songs all afternoon, attracting crowds which even sang along at times. I ran a YouTube search, and this is certainly not the first time he's done it. I grabbed a video of Vertigo.

We also visited one of the biggest shrines in Tokyo that is close to Harajuku, but after the temple-orgy that was Kyoto, I don't have very much new insight to add, other than this picture of me with a pretty sweet gate:

One of the shopping malls in Harajuku was built so that the most expensive stores were at the top and the prices fell as people walked down circularly, kind of like in the New York Guggenheim. The goal is that shoppers can always see half of the stores and will walk past all of them (including a combination Bank and Cafe - seriously). It was a pretty cool building, and the home of the bra mentioned above. We were not allowed to take pictures indoors. Oops:

This is one of Harajuku's independent designer streets, all of which were crowded to capacity:

We headed to the Amayoko Arcade next, which was the site of a huge WWII black market, and is still today a fish and discount clothing market. Lonely Planet highly recommended it, but it was really quite disappointing, other than parts of the exotic fish market:

P.S. Teacup poodles really exist.
P.S.2. Japanese rescue squad!

P.S.3. The picture is too small to see this, but Out of Order Shop was fittingly closed.

As a preview

2007-07-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

The catching up series will have to continue with:
Part 6. Harajuku
Part 7. Nagoya day one
Part 8. Nagoya day two

It will happen. I promise.

Catching Up: Part 5. (Kyoto day three)

2007-07-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note on something I've noticed about Japanese culture:
One of my friends from Yale wrote a facebook message about how sad it was that white people often get preferential treatment in third world countries. Obviously Japan is in no way a third world country, but still it's interesting that this is not at all true here. The Japanese are incredibly nice to everyone in every situation (we had one cab driver that was a bit rude-but the fact that we noticed it and complained about it is a testament to this) but they are even more courteous to other Japanese. The most extreme example this was when I got kicked out of a store for not being Japanese. Appearantly, it is impossible for an immigrant to really ever be considered Japanese. Some Korean immigrant families have lived here for hundreds of years and still haven't recieved citizenship. It's an exculsive society.

We left Uno House early this morning and walked first to the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Although it is one most important historic places in Japan, a lot of it was left up to the imagination. It was more or less closed off, empty, and anticlimatic - although we did take a lot of pictures on one of the bridges in its gardens.

Nijo Castle treated us better and convinced us that the world really was a more interesting place 300 years ago. The most story-worthy part of this Shogun castle is its "nightingale floor" - which has a high-pitched squeak whenever anyone walks on it. It was installed to warn the shogun of assassins...

Exhausted after three days of trekking Kyoto, we took cabs to Kyoto Eki (Kyoto train station), which is now one of my favorite buildings in the world:
The complex includes only a couple dozen tracks and is not even a terminal on most lines but it includes a multi-story shopping mall, many restaurants, and thousands of people. It's a testament to how important trains are to the Japanese: train stations here function as the centers of cities, much in the way I imagine Grand Central used to a century ago in New York. We took the Shinkansen (bullet train) from here to Tokyo - a system that is so important here that a 14-car train runs from Kyoto to Tokyo every four minutes. I have a video of a part of the train ride. My favorite segment was riding through Yokohama, which is the biggest suburb of Tokyo. I read later that its downtown is trying to rival Tokyo as a destination - and it is by all means succeeding. The number and density of skyscrapers is unmatched by any other "suburb" I have ever been to.

I almost published this post with the ending of "we were all burned out so we just went to sleep early", but I just realized that it's completely untrue. We came back to the University of Tokyo for a whole hour before we were back in Roppongi to see a Japanese Beatles cover band that had appearantly opened for the Killers in New York. They didn't speak English but were amazing, performing every song just about flawlessly, even taking requests from all over the discography. John Lennon was especially true to form - he even looked like Lennon. Someone else in our group said that his only gripe was that the Japanese Ringo "was too good of a drummer."

I don't have pictures of this because I killed my cell phone camera for the trip. I can only charge it from my computer but that won't work unless the phone is on in the first place. We had to come back around 11:30pm because we didn't want to miss the last subway, but we are probably going to go again. I am convinced that the Japanese economy is hurt considerably by the fact that subways close. Tokyo actually shuts down. I might write my course paper about it.

I do have plenty of bonus photos:

The National Elections are on Monday and these posters were glued onto a shrine:

Bonus points to anyone who can figure out what is going on in this picture (we had it translated):

Catching Up: Part 4. (Kyoto day two)

2007-07-18T05:04:00.000-07:00

The plan for this day was to get up early and head to Nara, which was a capital of ancient Japan and is about an hour's train ride from Kyoto. The reason for the early morning was Typhoon Man-Yi, which was supposed to be hitting us later that afternoon and night. Kyoto and Nara are at about the center of the prediction track on the below image:

We ended up not leaving until noon, but we still beat Man-Yi to Nara thanks to both it slowing down and dodging us quite considerably to the right - actually further right than the rightmost border of the prediction area. Cain recommended Nara partly on the basis of a "deer park", which left us a bit skeptical, but the deer were out in full force. As soon as we walked into the grounds of one of the temples, the deer surrounded us. We had to back off into shops a few times after giving them food since they would eat anything. They tried eating my shirt, camera, plastic bag, and actually did end up eating my map of Nara. This picture doesn't really do it justice:

By the time we left the deer park, the typhoon was out in full force:

Nara's real claim to fame (beside its history) is that one of its temples houses Japan's biggest Buddha. The picture is two below, but it doesn't really show scale correctly. The one directly below is better. The buddha reaches the ceiling of the temple:

After the Brazilian girl adventure of the last hostel, I was totally ready for anything from our second hostel, "Uno Guest House." We later realized that we should have been wary when the first hostel told us that we could definitely find spaces there the second night. It was a traditional Japanese guesthouse, complete with tatami mats, paper screen doors, oh, and a shrine to the dead:
It was in my room. We had all the ingredients for a horror movie including a broken emergency flashlight, and of course the typhoon outside. By nighttime, Man-Yi had dodged us so far right that it was not even raining. The Gion lantern parade was not cancelled and the party was in the streets.

P.S. If any of you like Stars and don't know about this yet, their new album is out and it's pretty good. If you don't want to buy it (I can't imagine it being downloadable anywhere yet), at least get "Personal" and "The Night Starts Here".

Catching Up: Part 3. (Kyoto day one)

2007-07-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

Although we've already introduced ourselves to Tokyo pretty thoroughly, University of Tokyo threw us a welcome party on Thursday night. The vice president of the university gave a speech, we toasted future university relations, had more sushi, and talked to the Todai kids again (including western music kid, who's now emailed me and wants to come to karaoke with us). After the party, some panicked packing, and frantic subway hopping, we found our night bus to Kyoto. It wasn't all that much cheaper than the bullet train ($45 to $100), but we've done plenty of more stupid things this last week in the name of the Japanese experience.

We arrived in Kyoto around 5am and had found our hostel in Gion by 7am. Gion pretty much blew me away. I was expecting it to be touristy and crowded, but it turns out that the Kyoto downtown draws away the crowds, resulting in Gion being completely sleepy. As much as the story was fictional and falsified, having read Memoirs of a Geisha completely amplified the experience of walking through Gion. The narrow streets, lanterns, screen doors, tea houses, and locals in kimonos don't exist in an effort to preserve culture to outsiders, they are still completely genuine and real. To me, this alone made the trip to Kyoto worthwhile. Two girls in our group have taken Japanese, which has been invaluable, but we still have plenty of language issues. A native gave us directions here by telling us to find the "pretty street."

By 10am, we found our first temple, on top of hill above Kyoto:

Then a second temple, built of solid gold, about a half an hour away by bus:We took part in a traditional tea ceremony here:

At this point, the group split. My half, "team walk", would find the biggest zen garden in Japan, a huge Shogun temple (below), and the Kyoto street festival (two below), the last two completely accidentally. To me, the most surprising thing about Kyoto was its size: it is by no means one of Japan's biggest cities, but it's downtown should belong in a city the size of L.A. It was bright, crowded, and would have even been somewhat overwhelming had we not come from Tokyo.

We went out in Kyoto at night, meeting a really creepy Scottish kid and a British investment banker who tried to convince me and Kersi to stop even considering it as a profession. When we got back to the hostel, a Brazilian girl was sleeping in my bed. It turns out they had run out of beds and had just given her mine. Oops. There were plenty of open beds, which made it less of an inconvenience but considerably more weird.

Kyoto days two and three will have to wait for tomorrow. It's way late here and another excursion awaits tomorrow morning. :)

Catching Up: Part 2. (Japanese mythbusters)

2007-07-15T07:08:00.000-07:00

1. Japan is expensive

a. food - busted (close to US or less)

b. clothing - confirmed (starts at $30/t-shirt)

c. taxis - busted (same as New York)

2. Rooms are invariably tiny- busted (below is my single - bathroom+closet are behind me)

3. They sell beer in vending machines - confirmed.

Catching Up: Part 1. (Roppongi + Odaiba)

2007-07-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

I can't do this in one post because it would be a novel.

Roppongi:

Subways in Tokyo close around 11pm-12:30am, and reopen between 4:30am-5:30am, depending on the line. We left to Roppongi around 11pm on Wednesday, on one of the last trains. Needless to say, the night was long and kind of debaucherous. A couple of us (me included) came back by a cab around 2:30, while the rest of the group came back on the first train at 5am. One straggler came back during rush hour. In his own words: "I was like, whoa, these guys in suits are going to work." Roppongi is Tokyo's chief expat neighborhood and is plenty sketchy, complete with drunk Hawaiian gaijin, all-night clothing stores (Mosi's 4am dress-shopping story was oft-repeated in the last few days), and street hecklers advertising strip clubs where "anything is possible."

Odaiba:

Built during the 1990's, Odaiba is a manmade island in Tokyo Bay. It is city-of-tomorrow-esque in every way. We took a monorail there on Thursday morning amids skyscrapers, shopping malls, confident preparations for a 2016 summer olympics bid, and a statue of liberty:

After stopping at the beach - a surprisingly good attempt considering that this is in Tokyo Bay - we found a Sega-owned virtual reality amusement park, but ended up going on only one ride, "West Wing." In line, it promised that we will experience: "ultimate crash!", "ultimate stray off course!", "ultimate engine fail!", and my favorite, "ultimate a fall from bridge!". The ride was a little silly and entirely in Japanese, but very much so worth it.

We had italian food on Yale's summer account (I can't exactly say that it was on Yale's expense since the account was established from our tuition, but still, it was nice) and went up to the observation deck of the surreal Fuji TV Tower.

These two days resulted in plenty of post-worthy bonus pictures:

1. Kasuga-Dori fire station:

2. Sign in subway station:

3. T-shirts in Odaiba:

5. Haircuts for Praveen:

I'm excited

2007-07-13T09:27:00.001-07:00

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/070424.html

ULTIMATE a fall from bridge

2007-07-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for Kyoto on a nightbus in about ten minutes. I won't have internet for three days so the blog is off until then. :)

Directions: If you're on Hunky Dory just find Kazoo Dory

2007-07-11T00:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday began at 5:30am (should have been 5am, oops) since we were heading to the Tsukiji Fish Market, which I'm almost certain is the biggest in the world. I might be wrong on that, but they sell in excess of $10,000,000 of fish every morning, so it has to be close. Surprisingly, the sun was up already:

All of this tuna (above) is auctioned (below). They go for $500-600 each, apparently.

This corridor of boxes of fish is about 30 yards wide and about 1000 yards long, all for this morning.
Some guy had eels for sale that were still alive. Unfortunately, we didn't get video of it.
We had what is probably the freshest sushi in the world. We got a sampler so it got a tad weird by the end (salmon eggs) but it was with one exception (salmon eggs) amazing.

After class at night (yeah, we have class - sometimes) we decided to explore Shibuya, supposedly the brightest and craziest place in Tokyo. It falls way short to Shinjuku in both of these categories in my opinion, largely because it is cozier and friendlier than Shinjuku. Mostly because of this, and because it's still at least the second brightest place in Tokyo, it was a lot more fun. On the way there, I finally found a Tokyo subway that people had to be pushed into:

I didn't get any good pictures of Shibuya, but I'll steal some from Mosi later, who took a picture from the top floor of a hotel that we had snuck into by telling the guard that she was "not taking pictures of here, I'm taking pictures of there." He was confused for long enough that she got the picture of Shibuya from above.

Will recommended a place called "The Lockup" - or in Japanese, "The Rockup." His acapella group had taken him there, which is never really a good sign. We had to go down two floors through a haunted house, into a basement, where we had to try doors to get in. All but one was boobie trapped with skeletons and such. When we found the right one, one of us (Jessica) was handcuffed. We were then led, and locked into, our prison cell. Swedish metal was the musical choice of the night.

An S&M themed outing on a Tuesday night would have been insane in and of itself but then we realized that it was "SPECIAL EVENT" night. The lights went off and we were joined by waiters dressed up as monsters who reached through windows (above), locked themselves into our cell, and pretty much attacked us. John (a tall Jamaican kid) got the worst of it, ending up in the fetal position in the ground. Shray (above two) was near the door too, but they just petted his head and left him alone. On the way back, we lost half of our group because we guessed wrong on the question "are they walking in front or behind us?" We waited for them in Shibuya while they were waiting for us in the train station. They gave up and got on the subway, but we kept waiting for another 5 minutes or so. Somehow, we beat them home. Because the Tokyo subway system does totally nonsensical things like this to us, we've started to joke around about a Tokyo "subway game" consisting of challenges to be completed using only a one-day pass and a map.

Today, we went to Akihabara - the electronics and anime district - to look for webcams, memory cards, and such, but mostly out of curiosity. I was looking for a thin camera, but ended up getting only Japanese baseball cards, a couple of Gamecube controllers, and some Japanese Gameboy games which cost between 30 and 60 yen each, which is about 20 to 40 cents. Laptops started at about $150, which almost led Kersi to buy one as a gift, but he couldn't find anyone in his family who needed one.

Roppongi tonight, Odaiba tomorrow, Kyoto this weekend. :)

P.S. This is why no foreigners drive in Tokyo: the below picture is a marked and metered parking lot. It has two spots.

P.S.2.:

2007-07-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

- I GOT MY LUGGAGE!!!
-40% of my meals in Japan have been (good) curry.
-Trying to pay for dinner in Shinjuku yesterday, we freaked out at our bill: 75280. That's about $600. We later realized that the sign for the Yen is essentially a 7. Oops.
-If you have any idea who Bobby Valentine is, read his blog: http://www.bobbysway.jp/. Look for the lotus leaves post especially.
-I'm not only winning the Berekeley 2010 fantasy baseball league, I am dominating so much that no other team has a winning record. Someone should tell Matt, Greg, and Alex to pick up the slack:

Rank Team Record Win% Games Behind
*1. Say No to Norway 87-49-4 0.636 -
*2. Team Canada 66-67-7 0.496 19.5
*3. Unlikely Winners 64-68-8 0.486 21
*4. http://www.campusleak.com/ 63-68-9 0.482 21.5
*5. Token JE-er 64-71-5 0.475 22.5
*6 Underachievers 53-74-13 0.425 29.5

I'll have a more intelligent post tomorrow. I promise.

2007-07-09T02:47:00.000-07:00

We had class this morning, but afterwards we decided to find this mystery rollercoaster that is visible to a part of campus. It's not only on top of a building, but it goes through a ferris wheel:

The whole complex is on top of a mall, and includes a good number of stereotypically Japanese things - photobooths, virtual sports centers (at which I dominated pitching), and one last thing which completely caught me off guard: the Tokyo Dome.

This is ten minutes from here. Baseball games will inevitably happen.

For now I'm still a bit burned out and resting. Instead of reading econ, I just finished Fantasyland, which convinced me once again that I won't rule out sports journalism as a carreer quite yet.

2007-07-08T02:05:00.000-07:00

I walked around the campus this morning, looking for a good spot to read. I found one that really can't be much closer to ideal:

Apparently, saying hi (konnichiwa) to Japanese people who speak English is a good idea: I started talking to a woman in the park who works for a company that represents French pop artists in Japan. Go figure. Our understanding of each other had its limits: at one point she tried to convince me that mutant turtles lived in the lake. I think.

We had orientation in the afternoon, which was considerably less useful than I was expecting, but the tour of the campus by the English-speaking club of the university made up for it. We had about 20 tour guides for a class of 11. Introductions were, as usual, forced and kind of awkward (year, major, etc.) until one of the Japanese kids introduced himself only with "I work at a Sushi Bar." It was a free-for-all from then on, they wanted to talk to us in English, and since a conversation in English is the only way we'll ever learn anything about Japan in the next five weeks, we gladly obliged. It was really fun.

The second kid I talked to was the self-appointed big western music fan. He practically went crazy when I told him I was thinking about going to Fuji Rock. He likes baseball too. When I told him I lived in Florida, his response was to ask if I watch the Marlins. By the way, our tour guide's name was Daisuke and it actually is said Dice-K, not Dai-sue-ke. By the end of the tour, we had left him with a list of our favorite bands. It included Guns 'n Roses, The Arcade Fire, and plenty of hardcore rap.

Just to demonstrate how little grasp I have of any sort of Japanese pop culture:
His favorite artist? Avril Lavigne
The first two baseball players he named? Dice-K (duh) and J.J. Putz (who?*)

I'll leave you guys with this:

P.S. What the hell is happening to Russia?: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/world/europe/08moscow.html?hp

*Seattle Mariners relief pitcher

I had Pocky for dinner today

2007-07-07T02:22:00.001-07:00

I've been in Japan for maybe five hours and I already admire the way the Japanese do business. The Delta person who checked by bags at FLL put one of my bags under the wrong name and consequently shipped it to LAX instead of Tokyo. Oops. I didn't notice this until I was on my flight from Atlanta to Tokyo and by the time I told a flight attendant (I kind of just wanted to complain), I had pretty much resigned myself to spending the day at Narita Airport, or having to go back to Narita another day, or both. Well, by the time I get to Narita, the Japanese Delta delegation had filled out my baggage claim and my customs form, rerouted my luggage, and was ready to ship it to me the next morning. I didn't have an address until I checked into my room so I told them I'd call them when I had it. They called me first and then wouldn't hang up unless they got to finish the conversation with thank you, as in: Thank you. Thank you. Thank YOU, Sir. No reservation quickly get indeed.

Tokyo, by the way, is nuts. I checked into my room and decided to postpone passing out jetlagged and have a "Welcome to Tokyo" kind of moment - I took the metro to Shinjuku. I stepped out from the station (which covers about 20 blocks or so underground) into a Times Square-like plaza, but with many more people than I have ever seen in any one square at one time in New York. I would later realize that I was actually on the wrong side of the station - the one with fewer people and places and lights - but first I walked into this crazy five-story manga-inspired gaming and gambling place:

Every third or fourth store in Shinjuku was an arcade/casino, freakishly many exactly like this one. I played in one and didn't win a pillow. Shinjuku's mass of people, lights, massage parlors, manga stores, and apparently, Algerian mafia, completely overwhelmed me. It was a heck of a first night, and I didn't really even do anything. Sorry for the aweful cell phone pictures, but this is kind of Shinjuku:

It's always nice to know that Bruce Willis can bridge the culture gap:

P.S. Best Associated Press link title ever?

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gang-Rape-Teens.html

2007-06-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t been in Budapest in four years or so, but driving through the city to our house, it still felt so much like home. Over this last two weeks, family kept asking me whether it was weird to be in Hungary again, whether I remembered certain places and people, and whether I could still navigate in the city. It was more like I had barely left; change is really pretty slow in a place like Budapest. We’ll see if the same is true for New Haven. I wish I could take good pictures of our new house, but I’ll give describing it a shot: it’s in the city, but in a suburb-y and hilly section of it. It’s built on a steep incline, and consists of seven half stories, including a two story live-in attic and a basement. Think of it as two story house – with frills and a yard – built on a hill in one of the biggest cities in Eastern Europe by an architect who might have been a tad high.

We barely had time to drop in at my grandparents’ (three days – it seemed short), before we were off for France. It was my grandparents’ 50th anniversary and they had a church ceremony and a huge party afterwards, to which even the priest and the carilloneur (MS Word says it’s wrong – but ha!) came. My grandpa has a winery, and so has amazing wine, and so the priest drank. He was really funny and one point told me to make sure I had Hungarian friends in the states. Europe is smaller than it seems, and after my family’s past cross-America summer road trips, Budapest to Cannes was a very nice two-day drive.

I’m going to include a little aside about roads in Hungary here: all roads to Rome may be the navigational tip of antiquity, but all (major) roads lead to Budapest is actually true. The major roads are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Roads 2 to 8 all lead straight into the city center, where they all meet in a huge roundabout in front of Buda Castle at milestone zero (although by then they had merged into four roads). They are numbered clockwise from road 1 which runs west from Budapest, essentially to Vienna. Road 0 is a ring-road around Budapest that will eventually connect all the others, in order. Right now, it connects, I think, from 1 counterclockwise through 2. The 1 to 2 segment is the Stephen Colbert Bridge that is under construction – it’s a good story if you don’t know about this.

We stopped at my dad’s parents’ in Szekszard for about an hour. My dad’s younger brother is single, lives with his parents, and is a multiple-time European champion of amateur radio contests. It should be a movie. I really like him. A bit after this, I learned the lesson that in Europe, English must be spoken very, very slowly. I tried to reserve our hotel room in Austria by cell phone. The Austrian lady panicked, replied with “I understand nothing. Nothing!”, and hung up.

I’ll try to sort through pictures and post a few soon. My computer memory is actually full, we took 3000+ pictures, I think. Austria was very green. There were a lot of cows, as you’d expect, but Milka white chocolate (amazing) was still expensive. They had wi-fi on the highway – for about a mile. It was “experimental” and not very helpful.

Borders aren’t manned in the E.U. anymore; it’s exactly like a state line, except for the language changes. We drove into Italy (Italia) at about 90 miles an hour. Here was where the smallness of Europe hit me the hardest: Venice, Padova, Verona, Piacenza, Torino, and Milano, are not only on the same highway, they are within 200 miles of each other! Give it another 100 miles, and you can add Genova and Trieste. I had pizza and ice cream in Italy. They were amazing.

We spent four days in Cannes (which was in the quiet lull between the film festival and the time all the European kids get out of school and rush the beaches); we jumped off rocks we were scared of a few years ago and played in the sand. We took day trips to San Tropez and Monaco, both of which can completely justify their exorbitant real estate prices. Awesome places. If any of you watch Formula 1: we drove the length of the street track in Monaco in about ten minutes. The racers do it in a little more than a minute, granted with less traffic.

I spent another day exploring Budapest, visited my uncle and family, spent another day at my grandparent’s (learned to drive stick-shift in the mountains (!) and finally had time to actually see my grandpa’s grapes), and now I’m pretty much home. By which I mean I’m crazy jetlagged but I haven’t been really resting: I’ve already played golf thrice, Frisbee once, and I've been to two Marlins games….and now there are less than two weeks to Japan!

2007-06-14T08:20:00.001-07:00

Europe is by no means the third world in terms of the internet – if anything, it’s faster everywhere, 3G cell phones are unbelievable, my dad watches live TV on his – but remote access points are a pain to find. I’ve been able to check my e-mail only once in the last week, and that was by connecting through my dad’s cell phone which was on roaming and making an international call back to Hungary...

OK, so I’m in France. I’ll get there in a minute.

I don’t have much to do, so it’ll be a long minute. A few of you have heard my move-out airplane story, so I’ll condense: I missed my flight. I had to buy a new ticket. That flight was delayed so much that my luggage not only didn’t arrive on my flight, it beat me to Florida by a day. On day one of my adventure, I made it all the way to Hartford, north of where I started. Culprit 1: the weather. Culprit 2: US Air rescheduled me as a stand-by passenger on a sold-out flight. Culprit 3: An airplane that started taking off, landed on the same runway, and was quickly towed off to a hangar after the pilot “heard noises.”

The last few days of Florida were spent packing for Hungary. On the way here, my connecting flight was late, which was fine, even though I hate JFK (the airport), because my brother and I reenacted the Tom Hanks crackers-and-ketchup scene from The Terminal at the Burger King on the second floor. If you’ve been there, and have seen the movie, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

I lied about the minute. I'll post about Austria, Italy, and France next time.

2007-06-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for Hungary tomorrow, really excited. I also finally booked my flight to Tokyo and thanks to the wonder of a multiple destinations ticket, I get to spend three days in Hong Kong, four days in Manila, and possibly half a day in Seoul. :)

2007-05-19T20:09:00.001-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law

2007-05-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Brownback tells a Wisconsin crowd that Peyton Manning is the great quarterback ever, then says his mistake "will go down in history." What?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/12/brownback.favre.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest