I just put up a set of photos taken in the Asakusa area of Tokyo here. There are brief comments on some of the photos. (Yes, I said I’d put up this set yesterday, but yesterday I was a complete wreck from jet-lag).
Category: Japan 2010
A travelogue of our vacation trip to Japan in the spring of 2010.
Jetlag: It’s a Real Drag
[Bonus points to the synth geek who can name the artist whose song I’m referencing with the title of this post. No fair using a web search if you don’t already know the answer.]
We got home yesterday around 6:00PM, I think. I say “I think” because after about 20 hours of traveling and sitting around in airports, and changing time zones from Japan to US MST, my sense of time was/is completely out of whack. The cats helped us unpack:
We stayed up until around 9:00PM when we hit a wall of fatigue. Then we were wide awake again a bit after midnight and finally got up at about 2:00AM. The clock says it’s now 7:15AM which looks about right judging from the angle of the sun outside, but no part of my physiology would even hazard a guess about the time of day.
Heading Home
This will be the last post from Japan, and it’s just a quick one to say that we’re about to start the long journey to home. I’m trying to not think about how it takes about 24 hours to get from here to there.
I’ll post a bunch of photos over the next few days, so check back for those. Thanks for reading.
It Started Innocently Enough…
Today’s our last full day in Kyoto. Last night we came up with a plan to make a mad dash by shinkansen to Tokyo to look for a particular JR souvenir that Adam thinks he saw somewhere in Tokyo Station. This morning, however, the notion of spending six hours (round-trip) on a train the day before spending 13 or so hours on an airplane seemed much less appealing, even considering that shinkansen are far more comfortable than airplanes are. So instead we elected to just hang around the Kyoto Station area, do a little bit of last-minute shopping and a lot of sitting around and relaxing. I also took the opportunity to construct a time-lapse movie of the main floor of the station. It came out quite well; I’ll post it once I’m home and have access to an editor and a good compressor.
Photos from Train Platforms Posted
I’m completely in vacation mode now. I tried to come up with something to post last night but I couldn’t convince myself to sit at the computer (since sitting at computers is what I do for a substantial amount of my non-vacation time). We’ve been having a great time and have been putting in fairly long days, and hence I haven’t found much time and energy for writing.
[Digression: The TV’s on so that we can get our nightly dose of somewhat incomprehensible game shows and surreal commercials. One disturbing difference I’ve noticed this year is that American companies like Glade have started pushing so-called air freshener products into the Japanese market. I’ll refrain from going into a rant about how these things should be banned because they’re essentially dispensers of airborne solvents and poisons, and instead simply say that it’s dismaying that a country that makes the best incense on the planet has become a new market for these nasty things.]
Score!
Tracie’s plushie shinkansen is probably going to retain the title of Most Bestest souvenir, but for the synth geeks in the audience today’s purchase would be the clear winner:
Yes, it’s a Gakken SX-150 Analog Synthesizer, possibly the world’s most famous ultra-cheap synth. Yes, you can get them in the US, with some effort, but somehow that’s not nearly as cool as pulling one off the shelf at the bookstore in Kyoto Station, buying it from the polite young clerk using a mixture of broken English and broken Japanese, and then waltzing back to hotel room, past the smiling and bowing bellhops, bearing it under my arm. Yes, I’m feeling a little bit smug about it all.
Some Photos Posted
I’ve put up a couple of sets of photos on my Flickr site. This set contains photos taken of/near the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) near Kamakura, and this set contains photos from the ramen museum in Yokohama. Some of the photos are duplicates of ones I’ve posted in previous entries, but the Flickr-hosted copies are available at full resolution rather than the fairly small format that I use for my blog.
In Kyoto
We’re now in our room at the Hotel Granvia in Kyoto. Tracie is delighted because we’re on the side of the building that overlooks the train tracks, so she can watch the shinkansen go to and fro. I’m delighted because I just found three new origami books at the bookstore in the station, including a new book on modular (“unit”) origami by Tomoko Fuse. We’re both delighted to be back at our favorite hotel, once again.
I’ve fallen behind a little bit on the blogging. I haven’t covered our stay in Matsue, where we visited a castle and the Adachi art museum. Before I write about that, though, I intend to post several sets of photos on Flickr. Stay tuned…
Ramen Part Two
We’re in Matsue now. There’s some game show on prime-time TV that involves brush calligraphy. Try to imagine a game show in the USA that is based on competitive handwriting.
On our last afternoon/evening in Tokyo, our friend Rafael ignored the jet-lag of a 30-hour journey ending the day before and joined us at our hotel. We ended up going out for dinner at the nearest Ippudo, a popular chain ramen restaurant. It has the trappings and arrangement of a traditional Japanese restaurant with the cooking area alongside the dining area. On Rafael’s recommendation I ordered ramen with miso as the main flavoring and a side of gyoza.
Japanese Beverage Report: Unknown Asahi Tea
I’m writing this on an express train we boarded in Okayama, bound for Matsue. It’s not as smooth as a shinkansen but it’s roomy and comfortable. Since this will be a 2.5-hour ride, I grabbed a bottle of tea from the nearest vending machine. It wasn’t stocked with teas with which I am familiar, so I chose this bottle somewhat at random:
To paraphrase one of the great lines from The Raiders of the Lost Ark movie series, I chose unwisely. I don’t think I could acquire a taste for this one. Tracie grabbed the camera to capture a visual record of my reaction: