Tag Archive for 'Japan'

Tokyo - London - Edinburgh (6,622 miles)

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Nev
on July 22, 2008
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I was quite pleased to leave Japan behind. Don’t get me wrong: I quite like it there but, after nigh-on three months of living out of a bag, I was ready to go home. I was also a little fed up with not understanding practically anything that was going on around me. Most places that I’ve traveled to before I spoke a little of the language or could at least make an educated guess at what signs were telling me. Being immersed in a kind of audio/visual white noise for a week was pretty disconcerting.

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Sayonara Nippon

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Nev
on July 12, 2008
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Let me get this straight. Blowing my nose or eating while walking is considered to be extremely rude but apparently you can cough up a huge gob of phlegm and spit without anyone batting an eyelid?

Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.

Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.

I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.

It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.

Going underground

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Nev
on July 10, 2008
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Today I purchased a day ticket for the Tokyo Metro and set off exploring, armed only with my iPhone subway map. I started off in the Sony Building, mainly slobbering over the 70″ Bravia (a snip at ¥4 million) and the stunningly slim XEL-1 OLED unit. After that I had a shoe shine outside Yūrakuchō station before jumping back on the tube and heading towards Tokyo.

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Big in Japan

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Nev
on July 9, 2008
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Yesterday I took a trip to Akihabara - the electronics center of Tokyo. Gadgets, toys and flashing lights are everywhere there. It is quieter than usual at the moment after the horrific attack last month and the subsequent attack on a policeman a couple of weeks after. All the same, I thought that it was still pretty busy.

Today I met up with a friend and his mum who is over visiting too. After wandering through the gardens of the Imperial Palace this morning and having a sushi lunch on the grass, we tried to go to the Sumo Museum but it’s closed for the week unfortunately. In contrast to the wrestlers themselves it’s very small so it was no great loss. We headed to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum as planned. About halfway through the tour a petite Indonesian girl came up and asked me if she could have her photo taken with me purely because I was so tall.

We finished off the day with a bite to eat in Andy’s Shin Hinomoto. I’m not the biggest fan of raw fish. In fact I’m with the school of thought that suggests an alternative name for sushi: “bait”. Even still, the food was very nice. The place was really busy (I’m told that this is as per usual) but we managed to squeeze even though we hadn’t booked. I would suggest you do book if you ever want to go there.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the streets of Asakusa and had to take in Sensō-ji while I’m here. There has been a scaffolding forest growing around the area around the temple over the past few days. I found out today that this is for the Hozuki Market where 600,000 people are expected today and tomorrow. Apparently praying here on July 10 is the equivalent of praying for 46,000 days.

You can see the attraction.

Melbourne - Singapore - Tokyo (7,285 miles)

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Nev
on July 6, 2008
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I don’t think that I was quite with it when leaving Melbourne. I was flying at 1550 and had a good nights sleep so I had no real excuses for being a bit dopey. I thought that there happened to be a lot of people called ‘Mel’ working at the airport judging by their name tags . . .

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