After a day of cafes, I checked into a new hotel. Not bad, except that they didn’t have the matching jammies in my size. Unacceptable.
For dinner we went out to the restaurant that inspired Kill Bill. It looked pretty awesome. They didn’t give out katanas though. Disappointing. My bud will just need to make me a katana to make up for it.
Day 2 in Tokyo and we ended up in some cafe. Meh, thought I.
What I didn’t know was that this was an art cafe, where the staff are trained to create 3D foam art with your drinks. With the choice of drawing anything, Nicholas had the smarts to pick the only real option.
I love this place.
We also went to some crazy animal cafe where they had a bunch of strange pets you could hold. I already have way too many pets, so I just asked if we could go back to the other cafe.
After a long hiatus, it’s back to Japan I go!
The last time my bud took me, he was tired. It was wet. I remember we slept in the hotel a lot.
This time we were determined for it to be different. Less sleep, more exploration.
I checked into a nice hotel, have a good view of the palace. Let’s go!
This time we’re traveling with Michael and Savannah, it’s their first time in Japan and they are super excited. In addition to that, Pokin will be busy for a few days in a work conference and another friend, Reesa, will be joining us. This is starting to sound like a crowd, but I’ll roll with it.
The first thing Nicholas, Reesa, Michael and Savannah did was book a food tour. Normally Pokin would handle this sort of thing, but since she isn’t here, we’ll have to make do with a regular guide. Unfortunately nobody told the guide about my allergy to anything non-chocolate, so he picked traditional japanese places instead. The rest of the gang seemed to love it though, they ate and drank all evening at different places.
After successfully navigating our way back to the hotel, we decided to call it a night.
Tokyo has a cool art exhibit called teamLab. Pokin’s friend Chris was the one who heard about it. It had recently opened and it’s technology meets art in a pretty cool way. But it was a trek by train to get over there. This better be worth it!
It’s supposed to get busy there so we headed off early. Once we got in, I have to say the experience looked pretty cool.
Wait.. WAIT. Hold on. Outside this art place I noticed they had a GIANT GUNDAM ROBOT. Forget the art. I NEED ONE OF THESE. Nicholas!!
While I was underwhelmed by the technology level of Japan, I do have to say that alleys are pretty great.
Tiny little back alleys full of restaurants and bars, people grilling meat and serving drinks… The golden gai and piss alley areas were especially fun at night. Many restaurants had signs that said “no foreigners”, which seemed a bit rude as I’m a pretty cool bear. They shouldn’t judge like that. 😠
We spent some time exploring all the alleys, stopping into random restaurants for some skewers. The skewers were good, even if people were biased against bears and buds.
We saw some pretty weird stuff. That was also cool.
Nicholas and Pokin met up with their friends Laura and Chris and packed into one of those little bars for some food and fun.
I’m warming up more to Japan.
This morning we got up for a quick flight to Tokyo. With the time zone difference it meant we got in around 5pm.
I had wanted to try out the famed Tokyo bullet trains, but instead we ended up on an Airport Limo, aka bus.
For the first part of our trip we went through a lot of countryside. It looked lush, I saw rice fields and simple houses, and a lot a lot of golf courses and pitch driving ranges. And thus I was reminded of golf being one of the national sports in Japan.
The shuttle can be as short as 1 hour but we lucked out to arrive during rush hour and it took closer to 100 minutes for our ride. It was interesting to see that the highway lanes were generally fairly narrow.
I expected Japan to be more modern, with tall packed skyscrapers everywhere. While the city looked very developed as far as my eye could see, the housing density was less than I expected. It also looked considerably less modern. Many trains did not have digital displays.
We arrived to our hotel, checked in, and with jet lag still in full force, passed right out.
The next day we were greeted with rain. A lot of rain. Today was the day I learned Tokyo gets 1,530 millimetres of precipitation a year. Vancouver, which qualifies as a rainforest only gets 1283 mm. So it was too wet for sightseeing. And we decided to stay in and work.
Before arriving to Tokyo, I had this expectation of a very high-tech metropolitan city. I knew that the country was very respectful of tradition, but I did not at all expect it to feel old. Compared to cities like Hong Kong, the metro station didn’t feel as modern. I suppose that’s what happens if you were early to adopt the tech. For instance, here is a photo of the Honk Kong skyline a few nights before, much more Neo-Tokyo than Tokyo.
Here’s the regular old metro in Tokyo. No holograms anywhere!
There are definitely a lot of vending machines everywhere though. Lots. For all sorts of things including tickets to buy ramen.
I also didn’t expect so much grafiti.
So far, Japan seems to be a very interesting juxtaposition of new and old.