Catching up a bit - Tokyo.

Well, here I am on the way home, 39,000 feet above the Gulf of Finland, 8hrs into the flight, 2 1/2 to go. Time to catch up on the last few days!

As I've said already, Tokyo was, well, not perhaps as good as it could have been. The fun started in the airport tho, it seems for whatever reason that when you book online with Northwest Airlines, the flight times it gives you are off by about 15mins - I thought I had a 9:20am flight, but when I got to the airport at about 7:30 (plenty of time normally), the board said 9:05. Add to that the long check-in queue and the 3rd degree interrogation I got from the Public Security bureau people and I didn't made it onto the plane with a lot of tome to spare - walked straight from customs through the boarding gate! Maybe it was because the Japan part of the fight I was on was just a layover and the final destination was detroit, but the officials were very paranoid about letting me on - I got frisked twice, got asked loads of questions about what I was doing in china, and they even emptied out my bag and went through it item by item!

Once I got to my hotel in ??, I had an unpleasant realisation: I was suffering from what I called "tourist fatigue" in a previous post, I just didn't really give a damn that I was in japan, and I didn't really care about going out to see any of the touristy things! Tokyo was my 3rd new city in as many weekends, and nearly my 8th weekend in a row of going out doing touristy stuff (I had Paddy's weekend off, but that wasn't exactly relaxing either). I forced myself to go out, but it was more because I was there and I felt I had to rather than because I wanted to. Not a great introduction to a new country!

That night being saturday anyway, I headed out to the club area in Roppongi, which was only a 20min walk from my hotel. It's definitley a different experience to going out back home - most of the bars are in basements or on the 3rd/4th floors of big tall buildings. Also, if you go to the wrong side of the street (which is easy), the streets are full of black guys trying to get you to go into their clubs to see russian girls get their tits (& more) out - massagi, massagi! Now I have a rule of thumb, if you're trying to give me the hard sell to get me to go into your bar, then I definitely ain't going in, and (this is going to sound racist) that goes double if the guy giving the hard sell is black. So, I picked a few non-strip clubs to go into, and it was defintley interestng. Expensive - Y3,000 entry and about Y600 for a beer - but interesting. Japanese women are definitely a lot more liberal than the chinese, and all those rumours you hear about the wierd cosplay outfits are true - my god! I would loved to have taken some pics, but I'd probably have gotten into trouble. Unfortunatley, there was a bit of a language barrier there so I couldn't really chat any of them up (I tried, but failed). Also unfortunately, ppl in Japan tend to go out late, 12-12:30 or so and by the time the place was starting to get really busy and interesting (about 1ish), the day's travel and the 7hrs sleep in the previous 2 days had caught up with me and I had to bow out.

The next morning I checked out of the hotel and moved to the hostel I'd booked for the rest of the trip. I've found before that if you're on your own going somewhere nd you are staying in a hotel, you'll be on your own for the entire trip, which isn't good. If you stay in a hostel tho, you'll always meet up with ppl and end up going out witht hem and stuff. The hostel was in Asakusa, which was billed as the "historic heart of the city" in the blurb on the hostel booking site. Unfortunately I neglected to get me mnap out and see how far from the actual heart of the city the historical heart was - it turned out to be up in the north-west, at the very end of one of the metro lines and pretty much very nearly off my bloody tourist map! Nice area, but about 20mins by metro from Ginza and over 45 from the big shopping areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya.

The next few days I just wandered around at random, not really caring what I saw or did. I didn't even have a guide-book, all I had was a map I'd picked up in the tourist info booth in the airport. if somethign lookd interesting on the map near where I was, then I headed there. Like I said, I'd overloaded on the tourist stuff, so I was like "Hmm, a temple, just like in Beijing or Xian", or "big shopping district, yup, like Shanghai again". Having said that, the shopping areas are damn impressive: you go to Shibuya, Ikebekura, Shinjuku or Ginza after dark and there's so much neon you almost need your shades! Big shiny lights overload!

As I said, I wasn't hugely in tourist mode, so I didn't give a damn really about the usual things like the Meiji Shrine, but it was the little things that interested me there. The vending machines that are on pretty much every street are one - as well as the usual cold drinks, you can get cans of hot coffee out of them! Yes, hot, you put in the money, pop the top of the can, and you're drinking hot coffee, with or without milk (no sugar tho). Another thing was the menus in restaurants. Outside most restaurants they have a glass cabinet, with plastic models of some of the food they're serving inside. And these things look pretty damn realistic! Is a good way to browse the "mneu" before you go in, and handy too. In one restaurant, there wasn't any english menu or one with pictures (my lifesaver in Beijing) and the waiter didn't speak english, so we went out to the front of the place and I pointed to the one I wanted in the window :-) The third strange/quirky thing that got my attention was the tourist iformation maps that were up everywhere. They were very handy, but unlike anywhere else I've ever been, the maps weren't oriented north-to-south but to the direction you were facing when you were reading the map. So, if you were standing facing south-east when you were looking at it, it was oriented with the south-east at the top. Took a fair bit of getting used to!

So, Tokyo. Nice place, just a shame about my timing on going there, I'm sure I would have appreciated it more if I'd gone there directly rather than at the tail end of a longer trip.