Japan - Day Five

Now I'm beginning to question exactly which days I did what, since I have left these posts for a little while, but the exact days isn't exactly that important. More important of course is what actually happened, regardless of the exact chronological order.

Hakone was a rather nice break from the city life, but there were only so many things to see there before moving on to some fresh new locations. To head to the next destination, we actually had to back track a little bit, possibly to Odawara. Which meant catching a bus back down the mountain, where luckily our side of the road was fairly empty as opposed to the opposite lane which was ridiculously packed with cars. Seems as though almost all the population of Tokyo was heading up to the mountains to finish off their week long holiday. Probably got out of there just in time.

Back at the train station we got to once again board the Shinkansen bullet train. Another 300 kilometers away was the city of Osaka, where we would stay for a couple of days. Osaka is convenient because it is close to quite a few places, including Kyoto, Hiroshima and Miyajima. Not surprisingly the train ride didn't take too long, roughly an hour. Heading further south revealed a lot more countryside, with the cities becoming more sparse and further between. There are quite a few farms in Japan, but they are small and very well organized. Most of them seemed to be only around half an acre, but they all had their expertly dug rows of vegetables and everything else they might have been growing.


Osaka was a nice city, not quite as busy as Tokyo but a big city nevertheless. One of the landmarks of Osaka is a huge ferris wheel that is built on top of a skyscraper. Being not especially fond of heights, I found it slightly scary taking a ride on the wheel at night. But it was a nice view, seeing the whole city lit up in the darkness. I guess its best to face fears like that and try to get over them.


The hotel in Osaka was an insanely small room. With the suitcases in there, it was hard to even move around as they took up the tiny amount of floorspace. Reminds me of what my room was like living in Christchurch. Well you can't expect much from a cheap room, and with a bit of effort I had to make it work. The hotel was right next to this gigantic deparment store, which was about 10 stories high. Each floor was designated to particular areas of interest, for example one floor had all the picture and video cameras, one floor had their musical instruments, and so on and so forth. The top two floors were restaurants and dessert places. Needless to say many interesting times were spent in that appartment store exploring the floors.

Intermission

Well it has been a little while since my Japan blogs were interrupted, but since returning to Canada it has taken awhile to readjust and quite frankly recover from the rather busy trip. Its finally starting to get really hot here as Summer is arriving, and I've been busy doing lots of little jobs here and there, as well as reading (or possibly rereading) Stephen King's The Gunslinger which is part of his Dark Tower series, its really good.

In fact, while we're on the topic of reading I stumbled across a really good list of books on Digg the other day, basically its the top 100 books for a man's library, but I'm sure members of the opposite sex would enjoy a lot of these books as well. Many people have no doubt read at least some of the books on the list, but there should be some there that might turn out to be worth the effort. The link is 100 Must Read Books - The Essential Man's Library.

The rest of the Japan trip will be documented in the days to come.

Japan - Day Four

The fourth day in Japan was spent in Hakone. The hotel there was really nice, with a large room and a view overlooking the bay. Hakone is a fairly small town quite close to Mount. Fuji with a large lake inside the crater formed from a volcanic eruption. The hillsides are covered with forestry and bamboo which makes for a nice view.


In the morning after breakfast we made our way down the hill towards the lake, where they had various attractions like swan boats, where you could use pedal power to boat around the lake. They were fairly fun, but hard work as well doing all the pedalling. There were also a few pirate sightseeing ships you could take to reach the otherside of the bay, where most the township was. On the pirate ship there were even a few people dressed up as pirates which was funny, they went around the audience trying to get pictures with people. The ships were fairly huge and impressive, with different colors and stylings for each one.


At the other side of the bay things were a little more interesting, with many stores and some historical spots. During the Edo period, the Samurai and Feudal Lords had to travel to Tokyo every one or two years, wherever they might have been around the country, and Hakone was one of the checkpoints on their pilgrimage. They had many of the original buildings there from the checkpoint, with a musuem built up around them showing all the different things they used to do. It was pretty tough walking around this area, as you had to climb up and down really large hills to get to the interesting spots. There was a huge garden built around one of the hillsides also, with lookouts overlooking the bay at the bottom.

After doing some shopping and trying some crazy Japanese food, we eventually made our way back to the original side of the bay and headed back to the hotel. Later that night, in looking for a place to eat, we got to have the fun experience of wandering around the dark hillside getting lost. Hakone seems to shut down completely at night time, with the only places open being hotels and places to stay. After wandering for a long time, we grudgingly decided to head back to the hotel. The hotel had food, but the restaurants there were extremely expensive, so I had to make do with a pack of potato chips and a can of beer. At least the breakfast in the morning was included, so I finally got to have some real food then.


The next day we headed away from Hakone all the way down to Osaka on the Shinkansen. I'm currently using a public computer at the moment so unfortunately I can't upload any pictures at the moment.

Edit: Pictures added.

Japan - Day Three

Day three in Japan was spent somewhat in Tokyo, before heading off to the mountain town of Hakone. Once again, we met Alex and Daryl, somewhat tired from the night before but ready for another day of adventure. Since we didn't quite make it to Akihabara, the anime and shopping capital of Tokyo, we decided to head there for today and have a look around. We took the train there which didn't take long at all, roughly around 20 minutes.

Akihabara was a really packed place, with multitudes of stores cramped into a relatively small space. One of the first stores we went to was a multi level building filled with all kinds of anime and videogame related materials. It was around seven floors of stuff, with each floor broken down into different groups of items. For example, one floor had all the DVDs, one had comics or manga, and one had all the figurines and collectible stuff. The last one I mentioned caught my interest the most, with lots of the anime collectible items I was interested in - Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, and all the Final Fantasy related stuff. I decided to splash out and buy a huge FFVII Cloud and Daytona Motorcycle replica, as well as a couple of the Evangelion's. Also I got a model of Odin from FFIX. They had large figurines from almost all the Final Fantasy series, as well as all the jewelry items like rings and pendants which was pretty cool. I would have got more stuff but I wouldn't have been able to bring it all back. I also grabbed some small collectible figurines which will make pretty good gifts.

For the rest of the day I had to drag around my huge bags of stuff that I had bought, so that wasn't so much fun. We went to one of the many "Maid Cafe"'s which is basically just a Cafe, but the workers wear these maid or anime style clothes which was funny. You can even get them to perform magic tricks or get a polaroid picture with them.

After all this excitement we headed to Ueno park, which is a fairly huge park in the middle of the city. There were lots of little temples and places to look around there, which made a nice break from the hectic busy city. There are a lot of soft serve icecream stalls around which are good, they seem to offer so many different flavours. Some of them I would probably be slightly wary of however, like the black sesame or tofu. But I may be wrong, they might be good after all.. who knows.

Later in the day we had to quickly pack up and get ready to take a taxi to the main Tokyo Station, where we would catch the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) to Odawara. After lots of dragging heavy suitcases around, we eventually got some tickets and waited for the train. The Shinkansen are massive trains which can go extremely fast, around 300km/hr. In fact according to Wikipedia, they hold the record speed for going 581km/hr on a test run which is absolutely ridiculous. Even traveling around 300km/hr feels really fast, because of the speed you can hear the air roaring around the train and you literally feel as though you are on an airplane taking off. The trip didn't take very long at all, only around 15 minutes to travel a reasonable distance.

After we got to Odawara things became a little more difficult. We had to transfer to another train to get to Hakone, but the station people advised us it would be better to take a bus instead. After a lot of time searching around for where to go, we finally found the bus. The bus trip took just under an hour and was horrible. The bus had to travel the extremely windy mountain roads in the rain on incredibly narrow streets. I have no idea how the driver could drive as fast as he did and turn as sharply as he did without losing traction on the slippery roads, but it sure made me travel sick.

We got dropped off at a deserted stop in the rain, and had no idea how to get to the hotel. After walking around for quite awhile getting wet, dragging really heavy suitcases, we finally found a place to call a taxi. Turns out the company only had one taxi in service so we had to wait quite awhile to get the ride. Safe to say I was rather glad to finally arrive at the hotel. The next day would be spent exploring the Hakone area, which is a mountain town near Mount. Fuji.

Japan - Day Two

Day Two in Japan was a rather eventful day that took place in Tokyo. After managing to sleep in a quasi-restful state until around 6am, I went down to have some breakfast in the hotel buffet. They mostly just had Western style breakfast items like bacon and eggs, but they did have some bizarre Japanese food items too. There was some grilled fish chunks, different pickled vegetables of some description, and little pickled bean things which might have been soy beans. Their breakfast items didn't look half as appealing as most the other Japanese style food here, so apart from the Soybean (which tasted incredibly bad) I refrained from having that kind of stuff for breakfast.

After this at around 9.00am we met a couple of Breanna's friends from her class who are also doing Praticticum's here, Alex and Daryl, who were nice enough to tour us around Japan for the next fourteen hours. We headed down to the subway to start with which was quite busy, and saw just how many subway lines they have. There are multiple lines and multiple trains that scurry back and forwards all across Tokyo, using running in a really large loop to take commuters almost every different location. Most the time while taking the train you have to stand up, but there's lots of hooks to hold on to. Sometimes the trains were insanely packed, filling up almost to the limit, but because the Japanese are fairly polite it was never much of a problem getting either on or off.

We tracked through some random areas of town before going to a large temple area where they had some massive markets. Its Golden Week here, which is a public holiday so most places where really busy, the market being no exception. There were quite a few foreigners around the temple and market areas which was interesting to see. The market had all imaginable knick-knack type material, basically anything under the sun. I got a couple of Shuriken, throwing stars, and some little Sake cups. Its kind of overwhelming the sheer amount of stuff they are selling, most of it really different from what I'm used to, so I didn't really get much there.


The temple was fairly interesting, they had an incense well where the smoke is meant to heal, plus dragon water fountains where you can drink the water or wash your hands for a blessing. The Japanese seem to be very religious and superstitious people, with many visiting the temple for blessings and to pray. There where many large stone statues of different deities and buddhas.

After this we took a couple of big ferries down the river instead of the train for a change, so we got to see all the riverside attractions. We stopped in another area that had a huge Statue of Liberty replica. Not quite as big as the actual one, but the statue was fairly large and well detailed. It was kind of bizarre that they would have such a thing. After this we went to the Fuji Television station where they were giving away lots of free items, mostly food. We got some eskimo pies and golden kiwifruit from New Zealand. They had a band playing and lots of random competitions and things to do. We entered into a loudness competition to get a free beer, where they measure you shouting out a slogan for the beer in decibels, with the winner receiving a full six-pack. Turns out me and Alex where no match for the Japanese, but at least we got a free can. The Television Station was fairly interesting, they had some bizarre stuff to do like a greenscreen photo where they superimpose these alien costumes onto you, so all in all it was pretty fun.

After some dinner we hit the night life in Japan. It was busy, with lots of bright lights everywhere so it was an interesting experience. We also went to a questionable establishment which quite possibly has scarred me for life, but I'd rather refrain from the details. By the end of the night I was extremely tired, almost falling asleep on my feet. I guess a mixture of jet lag and walking around for close to eighteen hours will do that to you.

The day after day two would be another day spent in Tokyo, before heading to Hakone later on, but I'll give details of that for next time.