Picture Gallery

BTW, my full commented picture gallery from the trip is here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dcordes/JapanMay2008

Final Day

I slept much better last night without any strange dreams, but was still up early. I took some pictures of the room, checked email and then put together my powerpoint presentation for the morning meeting.

Breakfast was downstairs at the Yahoo Cafe, and was mostly western style. Eggs, toast, fruit and then hot dogs, salad with blue cheese and minestrone soup. Go figure.


I killed about an hour, and then Mel and I headed off for our meeting. The meeting long and very successful. We left happy, but didn't have time to do the shopping at the place we would have liked, so we just walked the streets around the hotel

For lunch, we found the most wonderful noodle shop. You would pay at a small vending machine, which would dispense a ticket. You'd then take the ticket to a small kitchen area, hand it off to them, and they'd prepare your meal. The noodles and tempura were absolutely wonderful, and a stellar last meal in Tokyo.


We headed back to the train station after some light shopping, and rode back to the airport. It took about an hour, and was uneventful. After some additional shopping, and a couple beer we got on the plane.

I slept for most of the flight back so time passed pretty quickly. Food was a bit better then on the way into Japan, but still pretty poor.

I watched National Treasure 2, which was horrible and Cloverfield, which was pretty good.

We caught the shuttle back to the parking lot and drove home. I got to my house at about 1pm.

What a great trip.

As part of our meeting discussion, we were directed to meet again with the big boss in September. I don't know if that means another Tokyo trip, but I can only hope...

Dinner

Our dinner last night was a trip. We went to what the local staff consider the very best Spanish restaurant in all of Tokyo, and the food was quite impressive. I arrived a little after the rest of the people meeting for dinner. We drank a few beers, and then out came the very nice red wine and the first of many small dishes. First to come to the table was very thin slices from a boar leg that had been aged for three years, and was proudly displayed at in a prominent location in the small restaurant. The display was very off putting (see picture above), at it was the whole leg, hoof and all. The taste was very strong and quite gamey. Not bad, just very strong.

Next came hot pans filled with sizzling garlic, chili peppers and pasta. The smell was wonderful, and I dug in.

Two bites in I had made the determination that it was not in fact pasta, and was in actuality hundreds of baby eels.

And I still had a mass of them on my plate. I didn't want to offend my guests, so I did finish them. They were not so good.

They also brought out a wonderful paella and various fried seafood. Shrimp with head on, of course. Everything was very fancy and everything was not to my taste. What a great experience, though.

After we said good night to most of our party, Melody and I along with two of the local staff members went to a small shabu-shabu place for a night cap before heading back to the hotel. We drank wonderful saki and ate delicious sushi. Along with a small bowl of salty pickles with pink, transparent noodles that were the texture of soft plastic. It tasted less than wonderful. We were then told that it was imitation jellyfish. But the saki and sushi made for a great end to a very large day.

SUMO!

Asawa had a change of heart yesterday, and gave Kumano and Sakata permission to take me around Tokyo this afternoon. They suggest shopping and maybe even Kabuki, but I knew what was up, and asked to go to the Sumo tournament.

We took the subway from Meguro station thought Akihabara to Ryogoku. Right after you walk out of the station, you can see the pageantry begin with tall banners announcing the tournament.
Tickets aren't cheap, and we settle for some B level seats for 4900 yen each (~$50). And they don't accept credit cards... Ugh, guess I'll have to pull some more cash for tomorrow. Next cheapest seats were something like 9200 yen, or about $100. Yikes! That's as much as a Laker ticket.

We went into the Ryogoku Kokugikan stadium and got our seats, up high in the mezzanine. We still had a great view of the action, even though it was pretty far away. We caught the tail end of the very youngest Sumo group, and then the Juryo came out. These are the lower level professional Sumo, and we still quite entertaining. There were 28 wrestlers in 14 boughts. Even though the battle of each round typically takes less than a minute, each round takes about 10, with the extended announcement of the names and all of the extensive posturing before the the fighting starts. The timing with the two Sumo must be just right. They both must feel that they are at their peak, so there are many false starts and some posing and such. It's interesting, gives the wrestlers personality, and builds the tension before the round. If the battle is good, it makes things much more exiting. If the battle is short, it makes things pretty anticlimactic.

Most of the rounds were great, and the whole experience was amazing.

After the Juryo finished, there was a short break as they watered and swept the ring, and then the Mokuuchi came out. These are the highest level Sumo, and the rounds were all much better. Much more posturing. Much more character, and much more excitement. Takamisakari was especially interesting. He comes out and all of his posturing is very robotic. The crowd just eats it up. They're cheering and yelling, and when he won, the crowd exploded in applause and revelry.

I took lots of pictures and some short videos. I'll post those later.

We had to leave before the very best Sumo came out, in order for me to meet up with the marketing group for dinner. I'll post that later, but here's a highlight, I ate both baby eels and imitation jelly fish.

I'm really sleepy right now, and I have another meeting in the morning. After that morning meeting, Melody and I are gonna find some market area and do some shopping, before meeting back here at Shinagawa for the Shinkansen back to Narita Airport.

Breakfast Mystery

We went to a traditional Japanese restaurant for breakfast. It was full of strangeness. It included a nice piece of salmon, a bowl of rice porridge , a small bowl of ground seaweed (to be eaten with the porridge), a small bowl of pickled cabbage, cucumber, and salted cherries, a bowl of lightly pickled egg plant, and a small bowl of greens of some sort (spinach?) with mushrooms, in a yummy smokey sauce.

It was very strange. Melody said the cherries were really good, so a hauled off and took a bite. But they had a pit, and I just about split my tooth. I told her that I'd I'd just expense the dentist visit.

While it was adventurous, it's difficult to have a less than comforting breakfast in the morning. I was kinda out of it to begin with, and the bite of cherry pit certainly woke me up, but it wasn't really the best start for the morning. Next time, pancakes please.

Awesome...

I've been given the afternoon off by the boss. He's given me two escorts and we're off to see some sights. Not sure what, and their english is pretty broken. But, adventure ho!

Dreams

Lots of really strange dreams last night. It was like the sleep I get while camping or in a fever. I was up about every 30m, and then up an hour before I needed to be. Couldn't get back to sleep. So, posting and catching up on email and such.

TV here is not as good as last time. I only have about 6 stations, and it seems like all are news shows, or these weird panel shows where there at least 4 people standing up talking about something. The funniest thing I've seen so far was a segment in on of those shows where they had an American guy trying to say Japanese words, and they had to guess what he was saying. Like he'd say "NUN-CHUCK", and they'd have to figure out that he was saying "nun chucku". They didn't know what he was saying about half the time. I'm used to dealing with people with bad English, so it funny to see the roles reversed.

Today's challenge will be staying awake during long meeting in a warm room, when all the conversation is in Japanese.

I think we might go to the Ueno market.

Of Japan and Little Sleep...

It's about 10:30pm local time. About 6:30 PST, and I still haven't slept. So if this doesn't make a lot of sense, please forgive me.

I've switched here to blogger, instead of Twitter, since I can't update Twitter from here in Tokyo. It might be useful some other time, but for now, full blog posts are the way to go I think.

We left from LAX about 30m late, due to congestion on the Tokyo area, but landed a little ahead of schedule. The flight was long and full of aches. I watched The Golden Compass, which was pretty good, but had a poor ending. Also watched some of Jumper (good concept, poor direction) and some of that recent Tom Hanks movie with him as a politician battling to fund the Afgans against the communists. The latter seemed pretty good, but I missed the beginning and we landed before it ended. Hopefully I'll catch it on the way back.

I also read some of my H.P. Lovecraft book. It's brilliant. The tone and setting, and some of the verbiage are a bit archaic, but the stories are absolutely modern.

I also slept a little bit.

The guy next to me spent half the flight working on the Sudoku puzzle in the airline's magazine. I don't think he ever finished.

We arrived a little early, bought "green car" train tickets from the Tokyo Airport to the Shinagawa station, which is right near our hotel. We killed about 30m waiting for the train to arrive and get set up. We checked out a little 7-11 type shop, I think it was called Kiosk, and bought a beer and some snacks, though I wasn't really hungry. As we were waiting, the train pulled up, and we watched as all the seats inside rotated around to face the opposite direction. It was like some kind of bizarre mechanical dance going on inside this lit fishbowl of a train car. So, when a train arrives, instead of it having to loop around to face the returning direction, just the chairs rotate. Pretty neat idea.

The train ride was beautiful. The sun was setting and about half of the hour long train ride was through bamboo and deciduous forest, interspersed with picturesque rice paddies. It could not have been more beautiful. Eventually, the forest of green gave way to a forest of houses and buildings and industry, and we arrived at the station.

We found our way out of the station, and after a little exploring, found our hotel and checked in without issue. We showered and changed and went and grabbed some dinner at a local italian restaurant. Food was good, but later gave me some "tummy issues".

My traveling companion, Melody, was tired and went to bed. But I'm not about to lose a single minute while I'm here. She had already said that she wasn't interesting in visiting Akihabara (Electric Town), so I headed down to the subway station myself. After a bit of wandering I found a map on the wall and bought my ticket for 160 yen. After some more wandering, and a review of the map, I found the right train, going the right direction and embarked. 18 minutes later I was there.

I wandered up and down the brightly lit street and explored several different arcades, comic and video game shops. Each one was at least 5 stories tall, with each floor specializing in some specific aspect. 1st floor was typically a series of large claw style games where you could play to win a stuffed animal or some other prize. As the floors got higher, there seemed to be less and less people. I bought a couple of souvenirs for other people and, since it was getting late, I headed back.

Subway trip back to the Hotel was quick and without adventure. I think I'm getting the hang of this.

Called Jenn and caught her on the way out the door. Told her I was alive and well, and wished her a good day. Now, finally, I need to sleep.

Will update when I can.