Saturday, October 4th, 2008
We didn’t really have a plan for Saturday night. We got home from exploring Asakusa in the afternoon and were still in Wednesday’s clothes. Luckily there was a note on the room door telling us that BA had called and would be delivering our bags in the morning. Result! Well more of a consolation result, ideally they wouldn’t have lost them in the first place but hey.
This meant we could stick to our original plan of leaving Tokyo tomorrow to head south, so we made a list of all the things we still wanted to do in Japan and tried to make a plan for the next 10 days. And so Saturday night was assigned to going up Tokyo Tower.
Tokyo Tower is basically like the Eiffel Tower but a bit smaller (I think). The elevator ride up to the observation area is smooth as a baby’s backside, not like that rickety piece of shit in Paris. The views once you’re up there are awesome! Tokyo looks more like Tokyo from up here than it does on the ground. I managed to get a couple of decent pictures I think but they still don’t really do it justice…
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
OK, I promise that’s the last post title to use parrot phrases of the local language, but it’s late and I’m tired and not feeling very imaginative. Fiona has already stolen all the good chat from today so this will either be brief or repetitive.
Tokyo is cool! We are staying in the Asakusa district, which isn’t the liveliest but is pretty nice, and still handy for getting places. We arrived at Narita airport only to be told that British Airways had lost our bags at Heathrow and they hadn’t been put on the plane. So we’re short of clean clothes and other essentials like camera cables for uploading photos - grr! But hey I suppose we’ll just get on with, hopefully the bags will arrive soon.
On the first night we headed over to Ginza. It’s mainly a high street with glamorous shops, a bit like the Champs Elysee but less snooty I guess. It was also very postcard Tokyo (or so I thought at the time), which I liked! The first thing I saw as I came out the Metro station was a 50ft poster of Shunsuke Nakamura above the Adidas store! We wandered for a bit and then found a little basement food court place for dinner - had a cracking beef teryaki dish cooked fresh right in front of me in about 2 minutes - it was exquisite and only cost 1000 yen (about a fiver). Wandered a bit more, decided we were knackered, and headed home!
15 hours of (badly needed) sleep later, we got up and made tracks for Shibuyu. Now this is postcard Tokyo! Think Piccadilly Circus but twice as busy, twice as many lights and screens, and the screens actually playing music out of them. As well as that, there’s advertising vans driving about also playing music out of them. And as if they knew I was here, a big truck drove by blaring out Oasis, with “Dig Out Your Soul - Out Now” emblazoned on the side. After years of buying Japanese imports on eBay, I thought I might as well indulge myself and go and buy it from the big fuck-off Tower Records in Tokyo! When I got there though they had some other Oasis stuff I didn’t have already, so I just bought that instead, seeing as i’ve already pre-ordered the new album back home, and would have no means of listening to it here anyway. When I got to the checkout I also got a free Oasis poster, which I suspect was only meant to be given away with the new album - “Present!” the little dude said as he handed it to me, all smiles.
Right I’m probably boring you now so I’ll just give a few observations of Japan so far:
- All the toilets have a built in electronically controlled bidet.
- Some restaurants make you take off your shoes.
- They have Mario Kart in arcades.
- They display maps at arbitrary orientations. Sometimes with North pointing up, some so the river is running across the way, some so the river is running up and down the way. Whichever they think looks best. It troubles me.
Tomorrow we’re going to the fish market, so need to get up early doors. Night night!
