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I just returned from a brief walk in Takayama. My main objectives were to locate various things to make Tracie feel a little better (e.g. cough drops, orange juice, Sprite, Vicks Vapor Rub). Remarkably I was able to find all of these things (yes, even the Vicks) within a very short distance from the hotel. [...]

I apologize for the somewhat anemic previous post. Our travels have been complicated somewhat by Tracie having fallen ill. She has a cold of some sort which we were hoping was just allergies, but no such luck. She’s going to rest in bed today while I make a solo exploration of Takayama.
Here are a few [...]

I just flipped through the photos I took en route to Takayama, and sadly they’re mostly not very good. It’s quite difficult to take a photo of something from a moving train. Things move by so quickly (or rather you move by things so quickly) that by the time you see something interesting, decide that [...]

We have arrived in Takayama and have checked in to our hotel (a Best Western, which doesn’t make much sense for a hotel in Japan but it is very nice). We took the bullet train, or shinkansen as it’s called in Japanese, from Tokyo to Nagoya. The shinkansen was fast and fairly smooth, the seats [...]

We’re about to catch a taxi to Tokyo Station to board one of Japan’s famous bullet trains bound for our next destination. Don’t panic if there is a lapse in postings for a couple of days; it simply means we are unable to get an internet connection. If that happens, we’ll catch up when we [...]

We arrived at the museum shortly before it opened. It was raining a little bit at the time so we waited in the covered area in front of the ticket vending machines. Once we were inside we were approached by a young attendant who noticed us gazing around trying to figure out where we might [...]

I did say I had two points to make in my previous post, didn’t I? The second thing was this: I made a quip about decaffeinated beverages and the Japanese consciousness in an earlier post. However, when we asked Tamae-san about decaf coffee, the poor dear did look at us with some amount of skepticism [...]

It’s about 8:15AM and we just finished breakfast. We’re heading for the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno park shortly, but I thought of a couple of things over breakfast that I meant to mention in yesterday’s entry.
The first thing I forgot to describe was the couple sitting near us in the noodle booth. They arrived [...]

I first heard the song Technopolis by Yellow Magic Orchestra about 27 years ago. YMO was a pioneering synth-pop band in the 1980s that achieved international recognition, a rare feat for a Japanese band. The song Technopolis is about Tokyo; it features as its sole lyrics a voice synthesizer spelling the word “T-E-C-H-N-O-P-O-L-I-S” and uttering [...]

I’ll explain the inside joke: my friend Dan Phillips happened to be in Tokyo a week or so before we arrived here. He IMed me with a certain amount of glee because he had just discovered a brand of canned coffee called Deeppresso. I found some in a vending machine today. It’s quite good.