Hey fans. All of you have probably noticed I’ve not been posting recently. This is because of a rather nasty cold I managed to pick up on my way back from the land of the rising sun. That and my laptop died half way through the trip.
I have however recovered nicely and am back on home turf. To make up for my absence I’ll treat you to a few nice stories each day of my trip to Japan. One or two each day. It’d take me months to write everything down, so I’ll settle with little impressions for now while I organise my thoughts.
So here goes.. the story of my 2 week trip to Japan…
1. Arrival
I arrived with my sister somewhere around 6 PM, flitting through the cold and dingy clouds of Narita airport. Having not smoked a single cigarette in about a day I was anxious to get out of the airplane and hurried my posterior towards the inevitable humiliating security. The Japanese custom official questioned me extensively before I was allowed to enter and have my passport stamped with the tourist visa stamp declaring I had permission to land in Japan. As soon as I was through passport control, me and my sister hunted for an ATM to get some cash to get us to our hotel. And cigarettes. Oh the sweet death stick, how I have suffered for thee.
I procured some cash and rushed to the little counter of the only store on the rather grubby concourse and asked for a packet of Marlboros when it hit me. Cigarettes are CHEAP in Japan. For just less than £2 (or 2 Euros – the exchange rate was nearly par at the time) I had myself a packet of Marlboro smokes. After going into a designated smoking cubicle and relieving my addiction of it’s bite I finally realised that I was in Japan. Everyone smokes there. After thoroughly drenching my clothes in the lovely scent of exhaled tobacco I rushed back to where my healthy counterpart was standing and we managed to wrangle us a spot on the Airport Limousine – which is basicly a glorified bus service. And we were off! Off to Tokyo proper and our little hotel in Ginza.
2. A first glimpse of Tokyo
I had just about enough energy left to stay awake on the bus journey. I had not slept in over 24 hours and the incessant droning of the bus’s engines almost made me drop off into the lap of the Japanese bloke sitting next to me. Our stop was the last one for the Airport Limousine, so I was extremely happy when we finally arrived.We hailed a taxi and got to our little hotel in Ginza where we would be staying for the next four days. Ginza is the premier shopping district for everything haut-couture so my sister was looking forward to browsing the shops.
Stepping into the taxi, I was struck by that nothing had changed. The 1980s cars, the taxi driver with immaculate gloves and a face mask and not a word of English in the cab. I did my best ‘to the hotel please’ in Japanese and off we were. It was bitterly cold and it started raining by the time we two, utterly exhausted had booked into our tiny hotel room and finished unpacking.
The next morning we decided to go get us a coffee at a local coffeeshop and went on our first exploration tour of Tokyo. Having not spoken Japanese for years I rustily asked for a map at the front desk and we moseyed towards the nearest subway station. I was already dreading this as I mentally tried to recall all the kanji for places of interest.. Ginza, Shinagawa, Takanawa, Meguro, et al. My surprise couldn’t be bigger once I saw that everything on the subway was in two languages – Japanese and English vying for a top spot. Adverts and T.V. still appeared to be exclusively in Japanese, but most other things are signposted well. Things had definitely changed.
ANA is a great airline if you like cute japanese stewardesses.
Well, it:s been quite a trip so far. I planned to write more than I am actually doing but that’s because the internet in the hotel is quite frankly just too expensive. Im now sitting in a manga / internet cafe in some sort of little booth made for people half my size.
Let me regail you with some of the details of how I got to Tokyo and what a strange and above all interesting trip its been. Youll have to excuse the missing punctuation; Japanese keyboards suck donkey balls.
I left the UK on the 28th and arrived in Amsterdam after a relatively painless Easyjet flight. After spending a day with my mother and sister me and sis got up on the 1st to get to the airport. But then disaster struck: SNOW EVERYWHERE! Our plane was delayed by more than 1.5 hours. We were of course worried that we missed our connecting British Airways flight to Tokyo and if that`d cost us more but British Airways managed to get us on a quiet ANA flight out which left 7 hours later than expected. After having seen all of Heathrow airport we could ever want we were on the flight to Tokyo Narita airport! The Japanese stewardesses were very surprised at my knowledge of Japanese and my like of green tea.
When we arrived we took the Airport Limousine (read: bus) to Tokyo station and checked into the hotel.
The next day we were out bright and early – or well, i was bright.. my sister thought it was too early. We took the subway to Roppongi for breakfast and had a little course at Harbs, an expensive chocolate cake restaurant. From there we went to the Mori Arts centre where there was an exhibition on Medicine which spanned from east to west. We saw a geriatric superman and afterwards had a good laugh about the displays which contained things like Darwin`s walking stick and Abraham Lincoln`s false teeth.
After Roppongi we went to Shinjuku, where we found a great Udon noodle place and had a drink at the Irish Pub – I really needed a proper beer and it had begun to snow. After that we went back to the hotel and went to bed around midnight local time.
Well, peeps.. that`s a small curtailed description of my first day. As soon as I have some time I`ll put my travel logs for that day online and type a bit more about the differences between today`s Japan and the Japan of yesteryear.
My little trip to Japan starts today with a flight from London Luton airport to the cold wastes of Shithole airport in Holland. I’ve got my clothes, my trusty laptop (thanks for letting me borrow it, Nelly. It’s an OK device to blog and fool around on) and my iPod Touch with all the maps and info I could ever want. I’ve also converted a movie for along the way – Sherlock Holmes. I’ll be doing a review on the flick if I have the time while waiting at the airport.
I hope to have a smooth ride today, but you never know. I believe a mistake was made on my ticket so I’m going to try and resolve it before I depart. You never know what the prices are these days and I’m not made of gold.
And so, my day today will look pretty much like this:
Home -> Call Easyjet at 8.. plenty of time for breakfast -> Bank -> Library, Print out ticket (srsly, who needs a printer these days?) -> Home -> Kiss wife and cat goodbye and leave with the 12:41 train to Waterloo.
From there it’s a mild train ride to Luton airport and then off to Amsterdam with Easyjet. I’ll have just enough cash to make it to my sister’s front door where a warm couch and [perhaps] a strong joint are waiting for me. In the meanwhile, while I’m running around, here’s some Aircrash Investigations for you. Cheery, aren’t I.
Updates:
Sorted out my luggage problem with a nice lady from the EasyJet desk. Now all I have to do is print out the ticket at the library and make sure i don’t OD on coffee…
It’s been 20 years. 20 years since I left the verdant shores of the Japan I had come to love in the 5 years I had lived in Tokyo and traveled the country. 20 years of absence from the country I grew up in, had my first kiss, broke my first law, got my first BB-gun and discovered the wonderful world of electronics and computers.
I was born in The Netherlands and when I was 2 we moved to Germany, where I was introduced to the concept of friends with weird customs and different languages. At the age of 7 I moved to Japan with my mom, dad and sister. My dad worked for Phillips Electronics Co. and was tasked with setting up Signetics, an IC producing company in Tokyo. Needless to say, I was nervous about going. I remember waking up in a sweat when I had had a nightmare about scary ‘yellow people’. [I was 7. Sue me.]
What has changed in Tokyo since 1989? Sn0r will find out!
When we arrived in Japan and after staying in a luxurious hotel for a few weeks we moved into an apartment in Shiroganedai in Tokyo. I was registered at a school and life in the far east had begun for me. I made friends, viewed the sites and grew up amongst the cherry blossoms of the Kanto. 5 years later we left Japan and I never saw my old haunts and friends again.
Then just before Christmas last year my sister called and proposed a trip. Old family friends were living in Tokyo and leaving again in April and she suggested trying to see if we could get to Japan, visit them and use their apartment as a base for traveling around Tokyo to visit those old mates, temples, schools and shops. I jumped at the opportunity and will be blogging from frosty February Tokyo next month!
I’ll be posting a day by day account of my little trip down nostalgia lane from the 28th of January to the 14th of February so stay tuned! I plan to visit some of my old haunts, schools and other places like Meiji shrine and Kamakura as well as engorge myself on sushi, sake and excellent Japanese hospitality. I’ll also be exploring the differences between the Tokyo of 1989 and today, and hope to highlight some of the changes in this account.
By the way: if any of you have a good idea of where to go or what to see in a Tokyo I haven’t seen for two decades, let me know in the comments below!
Our recruiting drive for new bloggers kicks off this year and, unlike your mother when she carried you to term, we do really want you!
We’re looking for anyone who’d be interested in writing regularly or even those that just want to write a single article for 3nglish.co.uk to see if it’s something they’d like to do. 3nglish.co.uk is interested in any cerebral subjects you can think of.. from girlie subjects like shoes to
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The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on since the middle of last century, having been first postulated as a scientific possibility in 1959, but how far have we come and what new things have we learned?
In this Fora.tv lecture Professor Ian Morison discusses Drake’s Equation, Finding life on other planets, SETI@Home and how far we’ve progressed and what we’ve found.
If you’re interested in helping SETI out you can join the SETI@Home’s BOINC project, which will install a screensaver on your computer which will use CPU power when the PC (or Mac or Linux Machine) is idle to help go through the massive amount of data collected by the radio telescopes mentioned in the lecture. There’s even an 3nglish.co.uk SETI group you can join (search for 3nglish.co.uk when prompted to join a group).
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