Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

Pictures from Japan

Alrighty... Here's a selection of pictures from my trip to Japan. I might post more later, since many are on a film camera as well and those would need scanning. Open them in a new window to see them larger.

Here's the first picture I took after getting off the airplane. I'm sitting in the lounge of Hotel Nikko at the Osaka Kansai International Airport.

While walking around the airport, here's a picture of a small car called the Subaru R1. Notice how big the traffic cone looks compared to the car. Most cars in the countryside are about this kind of size.

Something else interesting about the cars there is that many of them have a little antenna on the bumper to help people park in tight spaces. Most are just simple sticks, but here's one that has the Mercedes logo.

Oh, and here's the logo to the Toyota Harrier / Lexus RX330.

At the parking lot for the Expo, there's giant plushies of the mascots. Shortly after, I saw a group of little kids gather on the benches for a picture.

I didn't take many pictures while at the Expo because frankly it was more interesting to look at the stuff that was there. The few other pictures turned out a little dark, but this one at least has a picture of a ferris wheel..... which I didn't actually get a chance to ride since it was in a different area of the Expo.

Pictures from the gondola ride:

My mom wanted me to take a picture with one of the paintings at the Sagawa Art Museum. So here I am.

At the Ohanami Kyubei, the hotel room looked like this. It's kinda nice actually; there's a lot more color to it than the average room with white painted walls. Using futons is definetely a space saver. They move the table and chairs out of the way in the evenings.

Some of the hostesses gathering outside before we leave.

Me at the Yunokuni no Mori making Japanese Paper:

I forgot which place this is, I think it's the old samurai's house.

And here's some of the scenery from the park.

I tried to make a 360 degree panorama but it didn't blend as well as I wanted it to.

Here's the place we tried some of the tea. They give it to you with small sweets that you're supposed to take a bite of and then drink the tea. The sweetness and the bitterness are all supposed to blend together to keep either from being too painful :P

Nearby in the samurai house, I saw this modern rendition of the paintings. Try reading the english, it's kinda funny.

The Kagaya front lounge.

The view from one of the elevators.

.....

When we sat down for dinner, this is what it started with. For everything that brought to your desk, I took another picture... It's like a 8 course meal. At the top is a abalone? (oyster?) that's still alive. There's a lobster in the center. The left has some cold snacks. The glass had a shot of something that tastes kinda lemony.

Really good sashimi.

If I recall correctly, eggplant with potato and seafood.

Soba in a wasabi soup.

Pickled veggies.

Is it abalone or oyster? Somebody said oyster, but it looks like abalone to me. Well, whatever it is, I kinda feel sorry for it being cooked alive. But it did taste pretty good.

Poached egg soup.

Miso shiro and pickled cabbage.

Apples and persimmons.

So that was dinner. It was good.
But so is the breakfast :)

.....*skip a day or two cuz my camera battery died Friday and Saturday was shopping*.....

Picture of the gate at Asakusa:

And so it is.....

Aww, bummer. She has a boyfriend.

Sunglasses

In an effort to use up my $300 in my medical flex spending account which expires at the end of June, I decided to get an eye exam for new glasses. I promptly found out that my perscription has pretty much stayed the same for the past 5-6 years.

So, I decided to get perscription sunglasses that would cost around $300. Oakley Whiskers using a Black Iridium polarized lens set and pewter colored frames. UV, polycarbonate, polarized. $256. Close enough to $300 I thought.

I get home, and find out that my dental work wasn't fully covered and that they're charging me $302. Freakin a. Had I known that, I might have gotten something a tad cheaper.

At least I get cool shades. :P

Trip To Japan

Last week, I was in Japan for the first time. Due to jet lag, I've been a tad late cleaning up and posting my logs. Here goes.....

Sunday 6/5/2005 - Monday 6/6/2005
Alright, here we go. The flight was about 13 hours, so I watched "The Pacifier" and "Robots" on the little screens on the airplane. That only accounted for about 3 hours, so the rest of the time I was either watching anime on my laptop until it ran out of batteries, sleeping, or eating.

When I arrived at the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, I had to wait 3 hours for my parents and the rest of the tour group to arrive from Taiwan. Exploring the international terminal turned out to not be too interesting since it was really small. After comparing the exchange rates for two places, I took the better one and exchanged $180. For that day, $1 comes out to 104.70 yen. Then I found Lawson, a convenience store, and bought a drink called "Lemon Water," my first purchase in Japan. With the exchange rate, all the drinks I bought were like $1.50 to $2.00. It's kinda expensive. But they taste pretty good. This one, well, obviously tasted like lemon gatorade. Probably has the roughly the same composition too.

After checking into Hotel Nikko (it's linked to the airport terminal by a walkway), I was assigned a roommate to make things cheaper. A Taiwanese guy about my age named Dennis. Everybody called him "shuai ge" cuz he dresses expensively and takes literally 45 minutes in the bathroom in the morning. Dude, he's even more metrosexual than Roger.

Anyways, he's into cars, and it was still a little early, so we walked through the parking structure and looked at the cars. The thing about Japanese cars is that most of the domestic ones are different than the exports. The ones exported to Taiwan are mostly the same as the ones in the US with a few exceptions. And while Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, etc. are all names in Taiwan and the US, in Japan, it's Toyota, Honda, Nissan, etc.

I already know of the Nissan Skyline since starting in 2003, it's the Infiniti G35.
And I know of the Nissan Silvia. (Nissan 240sx in the US)
But I see a Toyota Harrier. (Lexus RX330)
And a Toyota Windom (ES330)
A Toyota Altezza (IS300)
Toyota Celsior (LS400)
Honda Legend (Acura RL)
Honda Inspire (Acura TL (2003))
Honda Accord (Acura TSX)
Honda Integra (Acura RSX)
Honda Civic-Ferio (the normal Civic here)
Nissan X-Trail (X-Terra, close enough.)
The current US Honda Accord and Acura TSX doesn't seem to exist over there.
Toyota Wish (I think it's a Matrix)
Toyota ist (Scion xA)
Toyota Estima (It looked like a Previa to me)
Oh, and what the heck is a BMW M3 CSL? (okay, I looked it up. It's a damn good M3.)
(there's a lot more, that I wasn't able to ID or remember)

Something else interesting is that the logos are often times different too. Example: Rx330/Harrier has a eagle instead of the Toyota or Lexus logo. There's apparently a good market for these in Taiwan in the same manner that some younger G35 owners want Skyline badging. Many of these cars were hard to identify because they didn't say anything about their manufacturer until you looked at the wheels or detailing on the back.

For the most part, the count of Japanese cars I saw which were actually the same both in the US and the Toyota totals up to 2: Toyota Prius, and Honda Insight. The only cars that don't have some sort of code letter attached to the end of their names.

On the other hand, there's a lot of BMW 7-series, Mercedes E/S-class, and Ford Explorers in the city areas. In the countryside, almost all of them are the small cars like the Scion xA and other ones we don't have here like the Subaru R1 (at 54hp, I doubt it'll ever work on highway 880).

Tues 6/7/2005:
Early morning, we get on the bus to go to Aichi to see the World Expo.

The tour guide talks about some of the scenery we see out in the countryside area. When building a house in the middle of nowhere, they have a bunch of examples that you look at and pick one. Then they come to your piece of land, do the measurements, and in a month, you have a house. No concrete walls, very quick.
I think plumbing might be onsite processing or something. No clue.

The Expo was pretty interesting. It's focusing on environmental friendliness and a lot of tech. Some of the exhibits are more aligned towards kids, like the first thing we went to: Water Lab. It's your typical Lawrence Hall of Science water experiments showoff. Except with 3d glasses and lots of CG. Most of this one was CG, so they had subtitles everywhere in various languages.

And then there's kids shows that arn't CG but done live. Gas Pavilion featured a song and dance routine and a magic show where they set stuff on fire. Yeah! :)
Elsewhere in that building they had a exhibit regarding Methane Hydrate and it's usefulness as a safe way to store natural gas for transport and usage. It's basically methane froze in ice, since ice crystals have enough room in the middle to store methane. A show and tell demo involved letting us examine a piece (it looked and felt like an ice cube) and then setting it on fire with a match. Ever seen a burning ice cube?

Featured in another auditorium was a short CG art movie by Mamoru Oshii. (the guy who did Ghost in the Shell, which The Matrix was based on)

And in the Mitsui-Toshiba building was a short CG movie called "Grand Odyssey" about several ships of people who lived in space trying to get back to Earth. The thing is, they take your picture using a setup that involves 2 projectors and 7 digital cameras and automatically generate a CG representation of your face and cast it as a character. All 60 or so people per run. They don't have much detail to them, so it's hard to figure out who's what. They also discard the pictures that don't turn out so well since the computer can't figure out where your eyes and mouth are to reanimate them. I got cast as one of the ships researchers. My mom got cast as part of the security crew. The artwork was done by Makoto Kobayashi, who did the work for Last Exile along with a bunch of other stuff I recognize but haven't seen before.

Probably the most complex exhibit I saw that day was the Hitachi one that tried to mimic a safari focusing on endangered species. In the first half of it, you walk from exhibit to exhibit using a fuel cell powered handheld computer that used RFID tags to identify which exhibit you're looking at and then show you pictures, video, and text about the animal in the language of your choice. The other half, you're riding on a train like in Jurassic Park through rooms with just scenery decoration on the walls holding a pair of binoculars. These binoculars have cameras, video screens, and motion sensors built in so they add the animals into the scenery 3d. You can actually take the binoculars, turn your head to the left to see the actual people in the cars ahead of you while a virtual rhino is charging at your car. And with a sensor on your outstretch hand, they'll animate a bird landing on your hand for you to observe. If you try to look around it, it'll draw all the sides. If you flip your hand over, the bird will flap as it tries to hold on. Very cool.

One interesting thing is that most of the buildings in the area were designed to be eco-friendly. The Hitachi one had plasma screens that periodically told us the power consumption and power generation values of the solar panels above the building in between playing ads for some of the tech they developed for the exhibit.

If anybody decides to go to the Expo, please keep in mind that the lines are hella long. The Hitachi one had a wait of 2 hours in line. The one day I had there, I spent it all in just one little area of the map. If you wanted to see everything, you'd need like a week. One exhibit is supposedly really good but can't hold a lot of people, so there's a 3 hour line to get a lottery ticket to get a reservation ticket to go to (if I heard it right) the Mammoth Lab. Or maybe it's "Satsuki and Mei's house" from Tonari no Toroto. (or maybe both of them) Wish I could go, but 3 hours is too long of a wait for a lottery ticket. :P Oh, and they're trying to get 15 million people to go through the site. So far, it's been 7 million. They're averaging something like 70,000 a day now, I hear with some days going well over 120,000.

Wednesday 6/8/2005:
We left Aichi to go the Sagawa Art Museum. Along the way to there, we stop at a place for a gondola ride through some old waterways that used to be for shipping. The old man who runs these let me try out the gondola. How you're supposed to move them about it pretty simple but it's hard to keep the paddle from coming off the pivot.

The museum is featured a large number of paintings by Ikuo Hirayama and scuptures by Churyo Sato.

It's near Lake Biwa. This probably explains why we had lunch in a fish market area. The lunch was pretty good, and afterwards we shopped around market. There was also a small arcade, where I found "Aroma Club" it's from Sega, and like "Print Club" (the things that let you take sticky pics), this one mixes fragrances together based on some questions about you and spits out a small bottle. With my crappy Japanese skills, I decided to try it to see what it'll mixeup. Cajuput and grapefruit. Smells like.... grapefruit.

Afterwards we went to the Kurokabe Square in Nagahama. There's a famous glassworks shop there as well as a music box company that I don't remember the name of.

Dinner was at the Ohanami Kyubei Hotel. We had shabu-shabu, poached eggs, sashimi, salad, and various pickled and spiced vegetables. Something I noticed about the wasabi is that it's freshly ground and tastes cleaner than what we get in the US. It's also got the texture of ground ginger and is less green. I went on a stroll with my parents outside after dinner to walk off the food. The area around the hotel is mostly countryside as well, so it felt strangely old to me. Along the side of the roads was a rice patty. I guess a lot of people buy their rice here.

This hotel was pretty good; it was also the first of two hotels we stayed at that had an onsen. (hot springs bath)
Things to note about onsens: Shower before you go in. Don't stay in too long or you'll faint from the heat. Yes, people run around naked in there. No, the natives don't point and laugh. The tiny towel is all you get to cover yourself with. And with all the old people in there, it's nice that my glasses fog up immediately :P People there tend to consider it a waste if you don't go in at least before dinner, after dinner, and in the morning. My feet were aching from all the walking, and damn did it do a good job making them feel better.

Thursday 6/9/2005
The Ohanami was a really nice hotel. About 5 or 6 of the hostesses came out to see our bus off. Even at the end of the long driveway, you could still see them bowing and waving from afar.

Even then, we were told that the next hotel is even better.

Anyhow, first stop was the artisen village Yunokuni no Mori. There's a lot of workshops that sell various craftwork items. They also feature sessions that you can pay to go to where you learn to decorate and make stuff. Our group was signed up for the paper making one. It's a lot like the Hands on the Arts projects that used to happen in Sunnyvale as a kid. You make the paper by dipping a metal screen in water filled with the fiber pulp and then decorate it with gold and silver leaf, pressed leaves and flowers, and colored water. They then drain it of water and press it and package it for you while you look and shop around. I think it'd be kinda fun to live in a village like that and make stuff.

The next stop was a garden in front of a gate of Kanazawa Castle, which burned down in 1881. The park, Kenroku-en, was pretty and included many trees, little statues, and koi fish swimming around. We also spotted a duck in the water. According to the brochure, it took about 200 years to complete and belonged to the Maeda clan. They were one of the most powerful feudal families under the Tokugawa Shoganate. During their time, the garden was private and entry required permission from the lords. In 1874, it was opened to the public.

Afterwards, we went to try some of the powdered tea typically used for ceremonies. (maccha, I think) There's a pair of streets that used to be where people would come to eat, drink, and do shady stuff in the old times. Since the buildings are quite old, it's become a sort of tourist attraction. I believe the site is this: http://www.hokuriku.ne.jp/kaikarou/ What comes to mind walking down the street is that it looks and feels like what you'd see in Kenshin. :P In most of the buildings there are a lot of sliding doors. The reason for this is when you're out there doing your shady stuff, you're bound to run into people you don't want to see you there. So back then, they made it so that you can use the extra doors to sneak yourself out just in case.

Additionally, we saw a samurai house in the neighboring area. There's various artifacts from the time of the samurai. It used to be the house of Nomura. This site, http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~kunoichi/kanazawa.html happens to have references to both Nomurake and the Kenroku-en.

After that, we headed to the hotel. The Kagaya Ryokan. Dude, this place is the fanciest hotel ever!
For a hotel in Japan, it seems pretty big with 3 buildings. There's 4 common levels dedicated to eating, entertainment, and shopping. There's at least 2 auditoriums for shows. (We watched a guy singing old songs, a small dance, and then a large show where there's a theatre group made entirely of women, some of which act male roles.) In the middle of one area is a group of shops which sell all sorts of food and gifts.
The men's bath is 3 levels. (The women's bath is multilevel as well, but I obviously don't know the details.) There's an outside bath, an inside bath, and an open-air roof bath. Also I saw a sauna and massage chairs in the lounge. We ate dinner and breakfast in a room the size of the top floor of my house. Because the meals take so long, three or four hostesses would bring each course to your personal table individually. One of the things in the meal was an abalone that was still moving before they cook it at your table. The hotel suites had two rooms, each of which comparable to the rooms in my old apartment in Berkeley.
Oh, and listen to this: When you arrive, some 30+ hosts/hostesses line up alongside the path to the entrance and the path to the lounge inside just to greet you! And it appears they do this for every group! Cost? Something like $400 US a night, I think.

Friday 6/10/2005
After breakfast at the hotel, we spent most of the day going to Tateyama Alps/Kurobe. Basically, it's a trip across a mountain range and to also see the Kurobe dam. There's still snow on there, so the first thing I thought was that it was a pity that I didn't have a snowboard with me. Nevermind that there's no lifts.....

For an area all covered in snow and ice, it was surprisingly warm. One of the tourist attractions was the wall of ice surrounding the bus route into one of the stations. Some things in the gift shops that is supposed to be relatively unique is the milk and yogurt are pretty good, and we tried some veggie buns made from plants that grow in the area. There's also milk covered almonds that are a nice treat.

The Tateyama Alpine route involves going on a bus, a train through the mountain, a gondola, more trains, and so on. Very nice nature landscape. I think we spent about 4 hours there.

One other thing, in Japan, in various tourist places, they like to put stations where you can get large 4 inch diameter stamps that represent the area. Some of us bought booklets to get stamps with, some of us just use random brochures.

Afterwards, we went to the Buena Vista which, while it looked much more modern and business-like, wasn't as cool as the previous two.

Saturday 6/11/2005 :
We checked out from Hotel Buena Vista after breakfast and got on the bus to go to an area called Church Street in Karuizawa There we rented bicycles so we could explore the area. The point of this was so that we'd be able to go see the Alexander Croft Shaw Church and the St. Paul Catholic Church which would have taken too long on foot. Since the area is surrounded by shops and restaurants, we of course made good use of the bikes to visit many stores. My mom found French bakery and got some pretty good beef and chicken curry buns. We ate at a ramen house across the street from the bike rental store after we returned the bikes. The tour guide found it sort of on accident when one of his previous tour groups needed to find a place to eat and tried it. Since they all had good reviews of it, it's now one of places he likes to bring people to since being next to the bike shop is very convenient.

Because we encountered rain all day since leaving the hotel, we skipped on some other place we were supposed to go to and decided to all head to Shinjuku via shinkansen (bullet train) and JR. There, everybody splits up to shop around. I decided to go to a electronics store to help one of the older people buy a new camera. She ended up buying a Panasonic FX7 because we really didn't have any good ideas what to look for in the others, and our tour guide had one. I helped my mom buy a pair of cheaper earphones and I buy a pair of the Audio Technica ATH-EC7. Roughly $120-$130, they look really cool and they sound really nice.

Here's where it gets interesting: My friend Lulu from Cal wanted to meet up since she's been out here for about 2 years. At 5:30-ish, I call her while argue my case to my parents to let me to go meet up with her in Omiya since it's halfway from where she and Ken are. Yeah, that's right, my Japanese skills are crap and here I am telling my mom it'll be okay for me to run around on the Japan subway system from area to area by myself. That didn't fly too well :P But nevertheless, they let me go since the tour guide was going to show me how to get to the JR station in Shinjuku and let me ride the Saikyo line to Omiya. This matches up with Lulu's suggestion of walking around going "Shinjuku eki wa doko" (where's the shinjuku station) and then taking the same line to Omiya. Meeting point: Starbucks at the Central Exit, Lumene 2 shopping area (did I get that right?), peering out at a double helix shape in a large hall.

Well, despite being crammed into a train with almost no moving space, the trip to Omiya went pretty well. From Shinjuku, it was really crammed. At one point, some girl was leaning on my back for support to keep from falling over. As the train went from stop to stop, more people left the train and less got on. Eventually, I got a seat, next to some other girl who looked pretty cute.

Anyhow, I wander around the station, found the exit, found the Starbucks, found the helix, and called to find out they'll be a bit late. No problem, I went shopping. I found a music store which had a kiosk with samples and promotional videos from recent releases. Apparently, the younger people here like to import American music. So it was kinda weird standing in a music store and listening to Green Day and The Killers and whatnot in Omiya. Whatever the case, the kiosk had samples of J-Pop I hadn't heard of yet so I sampled some of it and printed out some info slips of the ones I thought were pretty good. I bought a pepper grinder for my mom which was in the shape of a bunny. You grab the ears and squeeze and it grinds pepper. Also bought a Totoro pillow, and a Mario screen filter for my cell phone. We also stopped by a net cafe to print a copy of the map local to the hotel since it's not in Shinjuku. (yeah, I found out that part kinda late, oops)

We meet up, go shopping at the Loft, and then head to dinner at The Lockup. It's a theme restaurant that hard to describe. Very goth. Dark. The entrance at ground level leads underground into what looks like a haunted house. When they take you to a booth, it's like you're being lead to a jail cell. They handcuff you and tell you to come along and the door to each booth is prison bars. The food is pretty good. One dish we ordered was called "Heaven or Hell." It's asparagus wrapped in bacon. Except one of them has a crazy amount of hot sauce inside. Great, huh? We rock-paper-scissored for turns at picking which one we wanted. Ken ended up with the hot one. Oh, and one of the alcoholic drinks was a sort of mix your own kind of thing. It looks like a chem experiment. A beaker with ice, beaker with Calpis, and then various colored liquids in test tubes. And so you pick which color liquid and play mad scientist. (orange juice, melon liqueor, blue curcao, rosewater, red something..., one or two more?)

So the plan was to go see one of Lulu's DJ friends perform, but we couldn't make it because Ken got sick. Most likely from the ultra-spicy asparagus we think. I feel sorry for him. Oh, and it was already 11:30pm, so I had to get to the hotel before the last trains leave.

Plan: Take the last JR Takusaki line to Ueno and have 6 minutes to transfer to the subway's Hibiya line to Kamiyacho. Conclude with a 5 minute walk to Hotel Okura.

What really happened:
Took the last JR Takusaki line to Ueno. Walk really fast following the signs to the Hibiya line to find out that the Takusaki line was late, and the last of the Hibiya trains left already. Oh boy. And so I try to ask the guy at the information desk about an alternate route, but he doesn't speak English and I don't remember enough verbs to ask him if any trains are still running that might work.
While I was trying to talk to the guy at the info desk, a girl and a guy who understand and speak English come up and offer to help me. Turns out they were going to ask about the Hibiya train too since they wanted to go to approxamately the same area. They decided we should go take the JR to Shimbashi to Tokyo (not sure which stop), and then take a taxi the rest of the way. Since taxis are cheaper with more people, they invited me along too. I'm feel very lucky.
Along the way to Tokyo, we chatted a bit. They were curious where I was from, since the girl is planning on going to Alabama as an exchange student. Their English skills are much better than my Japanese skills. It was also interesting since the guy was out in Thailand a few weeks ago and the same thing happened to him. He got stuck in the subway station and a person helped him get to his destination, and then took him around town later on. They seemed saddened when I told him I'd be leaving tomorrow because they wanted to take me around the area. When the taxi got to the hotel I thanked them, exchanged email addresses, and I paid for the taxi ride to the hotel. (I would have offered to pay for the rest of their ride too but I didn't know how much further they were going. At least I feel that I contributed something.)

Sunday :
After checking out from Hotel Okura, we took the Hibiya line to Ueno (yeah, the run I didn't make the day before) and then to Asakusa to see some temples. There we saw a bunch statues of Bhudda and various other Asian dieties as well as traditional luck charm kind of things.

1) There's a incense bundle thing that you put in a pot and let the smoke surround you. It's supposed to ward off bad spirits. But instead it hurts my eyes.
2) There's these sticks with numbers in a cylinder. After shaking the cylinder, you tip it and one comes out. With the number you look up the fortune in a drawer. The first one I get says bad fortune, so that's a bummer. On the upside, if you don't like the fortune, you can tie it to something to leave it behind. While tying it, I pulled too hard and it broke. To me, it seems like breaking a bad fortune note would be a good thing. So I try again. And I get another bad fortune note. Bah, screw this.
3) In a large candle holder, you can light a candle to represent a wish.
4) A nice lady who was passing by explained to me what to do for another small temple thing. For good luck, you're supposed to donate some small change, ring a bell, bow to the bell, and then knock on this large stone with a smaller one. Why, I don't know. But hey, might as well do it anyways.
5) There's a place selling silver charms corresponding to your birthyear. For every one of the animals, there's a guardian diety that watches over them.

....and then my parents go on the trigger happy picture taking spree before going on a stroll through the shopping area. Since we wern't getting lunch at a restaurant, we picked up some food at the supermarket before heading back with the group to the hotel to go catch our flights. On the way out, I took pictures of a Bentley parked outside.

At Narita, the check-in area is one massively big room. I checked in, then met up with everybody else to shop a little at the duty free shops. Afterwards, I went to my terminal and waited for boarding. The flight was probably about 8 hours, and I ended up at home around 1pm Sunday.

I want to go again. :)