This is the somewhat lengthy tale of our first time in Japan. We hope it will make you want to take the trip.
We took off from SFO on Friday and arrived in Narita Airport at 6PM on Saturday after an uneventful flight. We decided to take the train to Shibuya and we only were lost for about 15 minutes once we got there. It's really no big deal to walk to the Cerulean Towers from Shibuya station if you can find a map of the area and you have a compass (thanks for the advice John). The Cerulean Tower is REALLY nice with great views in most rooms. Although we had grand plans to see some of Tokyo by night the first day, We crashed in our beds as soon as we got there.
On Sunday morning, we took a stroll in
Shibuya, which is a rather busy place where mostly young people hang out to shop and play games (we saw a line of ~150 people at 7AM who were waiting to play some weird game involving little steel balls in a 3D pinball-like machine). We met up with Miz, Shamayn and Tom for lunch and had our first local culinary experience: tonkatsu. Basically some super finely sliced pork that is formed into a patty with various tasty things (cheese, pepper, garlic or oignons) inside, then the whole thing is deep fried - YUMMY. Although it felt exotic and all, this was rather tame stuff considering our next few meals. After lunch, we took the train to Harajuku. Tons of people shopping, with bazaar-like shops (
takeshita st.) right next to flashy ubertrendy malls. There is also a bridge where
teenage girls show off their peculiar vestimentary style (along with some skin usually), the whole thing is covered by national TV and a dozens of specialty press reporters. A shrine (Meiji) and street bands in the park wrapped up our afternoon. That night we met up with Shamayn's friends to have
shinko-nabe, the thing that makes sumo wrestlers huge (and there only meal). Tasty stuff!
On Monday we took advantage of our jetlag to meet up at 4AM with Miz & Tom (who had no jetlag to take advantage of, they are just troopers...), and head out to the
fish market. We saw a lot of sea creatures in crates, and check out these videos (
here and
there) of the Tuna auction. This was followed by one of the culinary highlights of the day: a 6AM sushi breakfast. We crammed ourselves in the world's smallest sushi restaurant and committed to eat all the (really tasty) sushi the guy behind the counter presented to us. This was more sushi I could have handled at any time of the day, but we felt it was the honorable thing to do... We visited the Google office later that morning, and left for Hakone at lunchtime (needless to say we did not have lunch). The trip to Hakone was an adventure, as we quickly came to realize what luxury Tokyo's translated informational signs really are. None of this foreign stuff in the countryside! We were using all our imagination to (unsuccessfully) infer meanings from the ideograms on the Odawara station's signs, as any official looking person we would approach for help would tell us with a terrorized look he does not speak english. By some miracle we ended up not only buying the right ticket, but also finding the correct bus terminal for our ride to Hakone. Of course, this made us realize the main difference between travelling by bus or by train as an language-ignorant foreigner: busses get stuck in traffic jams, which screw up their schedules which in turns makes the universal measure of time useless in order to identify where we need to get off! From an incompletely translated time table (which gave us the ideograms for Ashinoyu) we found a word that was spelled the same, but with some stuff before it, and we concluded this must be our station Higashi-Ashinoyu. We got off at that one, then followed our precise directions ("a 2 minute walk from the bus stop"). We picked a street at random and started walking. Using a print out of the name of our Ryokan, we actually made it with the help of very helpful (and super-friendly) locals. At night, we had our first
kaiseki dinner served in our room (very cool). Kaiseki basically consists of a lot (~20) of different plates, the content of which we made no attempt identifying. Our guidebook qualifies the food we ate as "adventurous" for westerners, and some of it certainly was. While we felt pretty good about trying all the exotic dishes, little did we know that the real rough stuff would come in the morning. Think you know what breakfast looks like?
Think again. That one was a little harder on our stomacs, and the maid kept on serving us more and more... Anyway, I must admit this stuff is more filling than a croissant and a hot chocolate, so I guess we headed out of our first ryokan experience full of energy after soaking for a while in our own private hotspring (the volcanic (=smelly) water was piped directly into our room). In Hakone, the highlight is the view of Mt. Fuji. You can see the mountain from a gondola that brings you up to an area of volcanic activity. The whole scenery is very beautiful, although the Swiss-themed facilities are somewhat tacky. We then took a scenic cruise on lake Ashi on a pirate ship (we like to travel in style) that took us back to our bus. Next stop was Toyotashi (Toyota city) where we would visit Elisa & Elia, two friends from College who expatriated to Japan. On the way, we had our first experience of the meaning of "cash society", as we ran out of cash and were told this was the only way to pay for our ticket. If you ever go to Japan (which I hope you will after reading this fascinating post) you will notice there are A LOT of banks. Even 7 elevens have a banking division over there. But this does not mean you can get cash at just any old ATM, as we were soon to find out. After trying a dozen or so different places, I called Elisa who gave us the secret handshake: the post office is where it's at! This is something you should remember on your Japan adventures: the ubiquitous post office and the much more rare citibank is where your foreign plastic is most likely to be changed into cash. Sure enough, we found a post office and salvation and half an hour later we were on our way to the industrial Japan of Toyotashi. Elia & Elisa live in an amazing appartment with all the technological gizmos you'd expect from our stereotypical view of hi-tec Japan. After a Geijin breakfast, Elisa drove us around in the city and dropped us off at the Toyota Technical center for a tour of the factory. Very interesting stuff, you can actually enter the factory floor and see the ballet of the welding robots, various moving assembly lines and the Toyota Production System is explained to the uninitiated. For Maureen, it was the first time seeing the production site of a company that makes "real stuff" and I think she was impressed with the sheer size and complexity of a firm with a market capitalization smaller than Google's. On Wednesday, we took off for Kyoto in a
Shinkansen (tricked out superfast - and supercomfortable - train). We arrived early enough to take a stroll in the old town before dinner. As a first time visitor, you have to be in awe walking through the streets of old Kyoto. The city is amazing, with shrines and temples all over the place, small restaurants and shops everywhere, people dressed up in traditional clothing, the whole enchilada. That night it was the return of the kaiseki, and I think we put up a decent fight. I am not going to say much about Kyoto except that you have to see it if you go to Japan and are into shrines and stuff. Check out the pictures we posted, and remember photography is prohibited in the most of the really cool places, so there really is much, much more. After two days in Kyoto (awesome hotel btw: ryokan Kohro, ask for the "cypress room"), we are off on the Shinkansen back to Tokyo just in time for the giant cherry blossom picnic Mizuki had organized.
Tokyo is amazing. It's really hard to describe so you will need to see by yourself. "Bustling Metropolis" really is an understatement when referring to Tokyo, there is no city in the world (that I have been to) that is in the same league. Standing in front of Shibuya station at any time of the day (or night) and watching the endless flow of people going places is absolutely mezmerizing. The fact that we were there during the peak of the cherry blossom season made it even more special. City dwellers are magically attracted into the parks to enjoy the beautiful pink trees. They will sit there on tarps for hours to reserve the best spots for afternoon picnics. Tokyo-ites play hard, and the drink of choice during these picnics are half-gallon bottles of Suuntory whiskey. Mizuki had organized a picnic for googlers so we spent the night under the trees at the Yasukuni shrine. The next day, we tried to visit some sumo stables, we didn't see much as most wrestlers were in Osaka for a tournament and it turned out these stables are not really open to the public. We had a lot of fun being gently chased away by big fellows, though... Saturday night, we went to my friend Taku's wedding which gave us a nice glimpse of a special part of japanese social culture. After that we went out with Lila and Mark to some bar in Shibuya until their hotel-imposed curfew (!). The next morning we went to Ueno park for more
cherry blossom sightseeing and met up with Miz & Tom who gave us the insider tour of the electronic neighborhood (basically a Fry's of the scale of a medium-sized city). At night we went to a Korean bbq place and then had a drink at the "icebar", a bar that is actually made of ice imported from some swedish river and serves (chilled) vodka based drinks in glasses that are made of ice as well... weird stuff. Although we were wearing stylish eskimo-style capes, it got rather cold and we did not stay very long. Monday was the last day of our trip, and we were treated with an amazing view of Mt. Fuji from our bed waking up. After french breakfast at Viron and a nice walk in Shinjuku, we headed to Narita Airport where we had our last Sushi on Japanese soil. We will be back... for sure! Here are the
pix
