Nihongo-a-Go-Go :: Aimee's Journal

Welcome to America, Land of Mom, Baseball, Apple Pie and insomnia

Well, I'm safely home and unable to sleep. It's currently about 5 am EST. I went to bed at 11 pm, laid awake until about 12, woke fitfully at about 12:15 to my precious kitty puking hairballs onto my souvenirs for everyone. Fortunately, everything was either in packages or plastic bags... so nothing's ruined. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to clean everything up, then banished the cat from my room for the night... fell asleep again, woke up at 2:55. Laid awake for fifteen minutes or so, fell asleep and woke at 4 am. After laying in bed for an hour, I've decided that while resting in bed with your eyes closed is ALMOST as good as sleep, I was just getting frustrated with myself for not being able to sleep. So here I am! Up and posting what I should have posted while I was in Japan!

First, I should write about Tokyo. To start, on the advice of my friend Miwa, we logged into the wesbsite for the Toyoko Inns. Toyoko Inns are an affiliation of business hotels across Japan. They have a reputation of being cheaper but still clean and quiet. We booked a night's stay at the Haneda Inn, which is about 15 minutes by train from Shinagawa and 30 minutes from Shinjuku. All set, we hopped on the Shinkansen [Bullet Train] and headed for Tokyo.

Tokyo is about the same distance from Nagoya as Rochester is from Buffalo. Normally, driving to NYC would take me about 6 1/2 hours depending on traffic. Taking the Nozomi (which is the fastest of the Shinkansen on account of the speed and the fact that they don't make very many stops), it took 1 hour and 40 minutes to get to Tokyo. Pretty darn cool.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, we were met with a unique problem. We had no idea how to get to our hotel. I knew the line we were supposed to be taking, but no matter what map we looked on, we were unable to find the Keikyu Kuko line. I think the single most frustrating thing about Tokyo is that their mass transit is owned by several different subway and train companies. In Nagoya, all of the subway lines are owned by Meitetsu. This is nice because when you look at the subway map, you can see every subway line. In Tokyo, I think there were 3 or four different subway companies and several overground train companies. This in itself was annoying, since you had to buy a new ticket everytime you switched companies. But the most difficult thing was that there was nowhere to find a map that showed all of the subway and train lines in one place.

After about an hour and a half of futilely running around and trying to find our train line, we found an English speaker at JR Lines information office. She was so nice! She told us that we had to go to Shinagawa, then transfer to a privately owned line. So anyway, it was a relief to find our hotel... and we decided to stay an extra night.

The first day, we went to Akihabara. Akihabara is a nerd's paradise. There are electronics shops with all sorts of new and exciting things... anime and manga shops, gachapon and figure shops... wonderful stuff. It was really fun to wander through the area and see all of the interesting things. But it was a little disheartening because everywhere we went, the prices were the same (and higher than in Nagoya). To someone who couldn't barter in Japanese, it didn't look like there were many deals to be had. Still, very fun. We went to a restaruant called the Rose and Crown for lunch. It was on the second floor in a building of restaurants stacked on top of each other, done up to look like a Victorian pub. I'll admit it - I got Western food. :) I got fish and chips and it was sooooo good.

After Akihabara, we trucked out to Ueno Park. Ueno Park is a rather famous park in Tokyo; it has a zoo, several museums and shrines either in it or around it. Unfortunately, we got there after most of these things had closed. A little bit of a bummer, since Ueno Park is known for its penguins. And as we all know, I love penguins. Anyway, the park itself is very beautiful, with wide walkways that are shaded by overarching trees. In twilight it was really pretty and amost magic feeling. We passed by several smaller shrines, one of which was being serenaded by a man with a flute. Nice ambience. The whole park was rife with cats, probably mostly shrine cats. To our extreme distress, a smaller just-past-kitten one was stuck up on one of the high fences around one of the shrines. We stood and deliberated if there was anything we could climb up to get it down, but eventually had to give up since there were no trees with branches strong enough to support either one of us. (And during our thinking pause, Mandy was descended upon by mosquitos.)

It was starting to get dark, and most things close early in Japan (by 6 or 7). With our options becoming more and more limited, we decided to go to Tokyo Tower. Tokyo Tower is a very famous Tokyo landmark. It was built in 1958 and modelled after the Eiffel Tower. It's actually taller by 13 meters [~42 feet] though, being about 333 meters tall [1092 feet]. You can go to the main observatory at 150 meters [~492 feet], or you can pay more and go to the special observatory at 250 meters [~820 feet]. We only went to main observatory, on account that it was another $8 to go up to the higher one... and more importantly, the line looked like it was about an hour long. Anyway, the view was beautiful. With all the lights, it looked sort of like looking down on a jeweler's gem case - with the highways looking like diamond bracelets of headlights.

We headed to the hotel and say our little room. The room itself was small but cozy... but we were once again disappointed by the rock-like quality of the mattresses. I can only imagine that love hotels have softer beds, otherwise I can't IMAGINE paying money to have a romantic getaway at one of these places. Maybe Japanese mattresses are just harder. Who knows? The room was also full of bizarre Engrish warnings and placards. Some of them were more important to read than others. For example:

I didn't read this one. When I sat down on the SuperToilet, the water loudly began to fill the bowl. I'm wary of these super technological toilets as it is, and I was startled by it. REALLY startled. My first thought being that the bidet must be soon after, I yelped and lept to my feet. Obviously, the bidet function didn't go on, and the toilet innocently continued to fill until the water was at a serviceable letter. As I came out of the bathroom after, cursing the toilet, Mandy informed me that she thought I'd accidentally found the "spray your ass with water" function. Isn't she sweet?

That evening, we ended up watching some of the Japanese sections entries in the Birdman competition. Pretty cool stuff. Different teams design and build (usually one man) gliders, and then they jump off a boat and see who can travel the furthest before crashing into the water. That makes it sound sort of stupid and neanderthal, but it's really interesting to see how they build these to be light and collapseable so that they just great away around the pilot when they hit. Some of them were just little gliders, but another division some had propellers! Those ones were really cool - they were usually powered by bicycle. The one that went the furthest went something like 22 km.

Day 2. We got up early and headed out to Harajuku, the "younger" shopping area in Toyko. Harajuku is known for its goths who come out on Sunday, and also the abundance of goth/loli clothing shops. We wandered around Harajuku, just sort of window shopping, for several hours. To my annoyance, I am a great target for panhandlers and charity solicitors. So when we were walking down the street toward an intersection, an Indian man came up to me and asked for my signature on a petition for aid to help hunger in some third world country. He was pretty adamant that I sign, and I didn't feel like fighting it... so I made up a fake name and address and put that down. Then he started with asking for donations! I gave him 50 yen (about $.50) and we went off on our way. I'm not big on giving money to solicitors unless they can prove they're actually associated with a charity... especially with targetting foreigners that way, the whole thing seemed kinda dodgy. Anyway, we continued our window shopping and just generally enjoying the nicely tree-lined neighborhood for awhile. Then we headed looped around and headed back to the station. The same man tried to solicit from me again, and I gave him a pointed "NO" and pretty much ignored him.

From Harajuku, Shinjuku was about 10 or 15 minutes by train on the Yamanote line. While we were there, we checked out some hobby shops, and also looked around in a big goth shop. it was 4 floors, I think! Some of the clothes and shoes were really beautiful. There's a clothing brand called Atiliere Boz (I'm slaughtering the spelling) that I just love. I think they make the most elegant, beautiful clothing for women. Unfortunately, their prices are prohibitively high for me. a relatively simple (though beautifully cut) white cotton button down can be as much as $120. Eeek. So needless to say, I didn't buy any. There was a great shop with very reasonably priced shoes and boots... Mandy got an awesome pair of shoes. I wanted to get a pair, but I liked the ones that mandy got, and didn't want to match. Other than those, there were a beautiful pair of boots that I really liked... except that they had skulls on the buckles. Ugh! So I left Shinjuku shoeless. Well, without NEW shoes, anyway. :) By the time we left Shinjuku, it was getting dark and had started to rain.

We had supper at a lovely litle restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory. I had some kind of pasta with a creamy sauce, Mandy had an omrice [a sort of omlette filled with rice). And then cheesecake! The cheesecake was very very good.

Then we headed back to Akihabara to check out some shops that we'd missed the previous day. We found this one FANTASTIC shop that seemed to have all of the things we collected in one place. We wandered through there for about an hour and a half, until they closed. It was several floors so there were a ton of things to see.

Back at the hotel, we watched Catwoman. I can't imagine it was a good movie in English, but it must have been even worse in Japanese.

The next day we got up early and headed back to Nagoya on Shinkansen. Some foreigners charmingly call the Shinkansen "the shink." They also sometimes make it into a verb. Like for example, "Yeah, I'm going to Tokyo. I'm shinking it." Before we left, we stopped and bought a horde of Tokyo Banana. In Japan, when you travel to another city, it's customary to bring "omiyage" back for your friends. Omiyage is basically just souvenirs. The most common, popular souvenir is to bring back a special local sweet. For example, bringing back candy or yatsuhashi from Kyoto, or Tokyo Banana from Tokyo. Tokyo Banana is... great. I've never had anything like it, though I feel the bizarre desire to try to reproduce it at home. It's simple enough - it's a very light and fluffy cake that's filled with pureed banana paste. They're very fresh and light. REALLY good.

The Tokyo pictures are here.

That day, when we got back we hung out with James. We had planned to go shopping (he says he has no ability to recognise the difference between good and bad fashion, so we've kinda become his fashion advisors) and then go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We did go wandering through many clothing shops for James to get some new additions to his wardrobe... and that was fun. He was looking for a new pair of slacks and a velvet jacket. Fun stuff. We went to a yummy cake shop in Osu. It was fun to go with James because he'll actually go whole hog and get two tiny pieces of cake. So I could too! YAY! I've found that I really love the Japanese take on Mont Blanc. about two weeks before we left, it became my goal to eat as much of it as possible before leaving the country. Unfortunately, by the time we finished cake and went shopping, we didn't have time to see a movie.

Man, I'm so out of it. I'm debating if I want to sleep for an hour or so and continue this later, or try to handle being awake the rest of the day. Hmm. There's no one online to chat with, so I think that maybe attempting to get some more sleep is in order. As long as it's during semi-normal North American "sleep" hours, I think it's okay that I sleep again... of course, in the time I've been writing this, I've also been eating the leftovers of my nachos from our arrival dinner at Zebb's... mmm. I was starving! Maybe being fed will help me sleep. And I'll write about Kyoto when I get up... wish me luck!

Posted by Aimee at October 1, 2005 08:47 PM