Tokyo Day 1: Two Country Yokels Marveling at Modern Technology

The day began with an existential crisis.  Actually, it began with Coco Krispies (we owe so much to Choice Hotels).  But then, we walked out onto the street and nearly into oncoming traffic AGAIN, because we find ourselves in yet another country that drives on the wrong side of the road.  But then it occurred to me - maybe we drive on the wrong side!  I used to think it was Britain vs. the rest of the world on this one, but we've spent weeks in more places this summer that are afflicted with the same disease.  If the car capital of the world chooses the left side to drive on, maybe it's the way to go.  Then I remembered exactly who dropped the bomb on whom, so I guess to the victor go the spoils.  We're right, they're strange.  I know I feel better about myself.

 

Our first destination on the day was Shinjuku train station, the busiest in the world (according to Eyewitness Travel, which we believe simply because it is not Lonely Planet).  We were sad to discover that the automated voice on the subway did not introduce it as the real crossroads of the universe, but we both informed every one on the train that they could, in fact, transfer here for everything.  Voices on the subway aren't that new for us, but that is just the beginning.  Everything here talks to you.  The elevator tells you when the door is closing, the train doors warn you to step back, we even came across an alarmingly vigilant "Do Not Enter" sign.  The station itself wasn't as busy as we would have expected because we luckily came a bit after rush hour, but the food court had some of the coolest desserts we've ever seen / been scolded at for photographing.  I can't tell you if they were good or not, but they managed to make a cake look like a cup of fresh squeezed mango juice, complete with a straw and gelatin ice cubes.  Genius.

 

After hunting down a Citibank (very tired of ATM fees) we strolled in the rain through one of the main business centers in town.  We were politely told that no, we could not just sit for a while in the 52nd story restaurant atop the Grand Hyatt (as seen on Lost in Translation) without ordering a $65 brunch, but that's ok since the view was completely grayed out by clouds.  We know because we went to the free observatory three blocks away and the view was, in fact, completely grayed out by clouds.  We were satisfied just imagining what Mt. Fuji would look like in the distance.

 

As it turns out, Tokyo in the rain is less interesting than one might think.  I don't know if it's because people can get whatever they need in the malls at the bottom (or top) of every office building and therefor stays indoors, or because this week is some sort of holiday (kind of like Easter, except more about death, less about rebirth), but we were just about the only suckers out there.  Good thing the fine people of Comfort Inn lent us an umbrella in the morning.  We wandered aimlessly until it stopped raining, then checked out a shrine and its surrounding park.  We weren't overwhelmed by either one, but that might have been just rain related crankiness talking. 

 

Tonight we paid $50 dollars to eat brown rice and seitan (any one in NY want to meat us for lunch at Kasbah on Friday (the typo was deliberate)), then walked around what turned out to be a bit of a Japanese teeny-bopper hangout.  Cafes, bars, and Pachinko parlors with neon lights lined both sides of the street for an entire neighborhood.  Major sensory overload.  If some one can read that link and explain it to me, that'd be great.  If any one can get me my 10 bucks back, that'd be even better. 

 

Tomorrow is a busy day of Sumo wrestling (who thinks I can take them?), templing and museuming, and shopping for electronics and elaborately designed fake food.  More on all that later (free internet in the lobby!!).  

 

Goodnight! 

If the building is a rockin...

For those who have read about it, yes we did feel the earthquake yesterday, not long after we got to our hotel.  We shook, we rattled, we rolled, then we waited for the building to stop swaying back and forth.  Good times were had by all, except perhaps Adina who has still not quite gotten over the "many earthquakes of her youth."   She made me take out my next comment.

 

Off to town!  Goodnight America.

Arriving in Tokyo

It didn't take long to figure out some key differences between Bangkok and Tokyo.  First is the airports.  While Narita airport (the closest international airport to Tokyo) is not the nicest or newest airport, it at least makes a mild amount of sense, which puts it head and shoulders above Bangkok.  Considering all the hard sale techniques we encountered in Thailand, we were sort of under the impression that they like when we give them our money.  That being the case, we were quite confused when we discovered that the duty free shops are ALL before the security check heading towards the gates, which means you can:t buy any liquor or perfume because it won't make it through security.  Perhaps other airlines allow it to be delivered to the plane, but not United.  It was bad enough that Adina lost her nail scissors to the guards (oops), we weren't about to buy some scotch only to lose that, too.  The other part we couldn't figure out is why they have two security checks leading up to the gate, and why they are separated by a sterile bathroom free zone with far too few seats.  First you go through the standard x-ray and metal detectors, then you wait for 50 minutes on an empty concourse for them to open the ramp to a second checkpoint where they actually empty your bag and check all the contents, then wand you (a bit too thoroughly).  They did this for every passenger on the plane.  I just don't get it. 

 

Narita, on the other hand, was fast and efficient, just like everything else here.  The lines moved quickly, our bags were coming out just as we got there, there were plenty of carts, and transportation to town was simple (though far from fast.  You'd think they could build an airport less than 80 minutes away by train.)  Our hotel is nice and conveniently located right in front of a train station on the same line as the airport.  Sadly, the tracks were washed out today and we had to take a different company's line to a different place.  The best contrast to Bangkok was when the woman by the ticket machines of the first company told us the train wasn't running, she sent us to the right place without trying to sell me a suit!  I'd forgotten that that could happen sometimes. 

 

One of my favorite things about Bangkok was their fast and clean metro system.  But it doesn't compare to the well oiled machine that is the Tokyo Metro.  For starters the service here goes everywhere, while in Bangkok they conveniently leave out the touristy areas so suckers like us are forced to take cabs or tuk-tuks.  (Speaking of cabs, did you know that in some cities cabs don't honk at every pedestrian they pass by?  Brilliant!)   After getting off our train from the airport we had to connect to a subway line, which was very reminiscent of the 14th street transfer from the 2-3 to the F.  Except replace the smell of urine, pirated CD hawkers, loud banging drummers, and the homeless guys and replace them with some potted plants. 

 

Our hotel is exactly what we were told a Tokyo hotel would be, but that doesn't stop it from being amazing.  It's　both extremely cramped and luxuriously high tech, sort of giving the impression of a prison cell on a very fancy cruise ship.  The TV is flat screen, the bed has a built in alarm clock and light switches for the whole room, and the toilet has a soothing seat warmer and refreshing bidet (calling to mind the age old question of which is worse - a dirty butt or a wet one?).  It's a little sad to have a gecko free wall, but we're quite glad to be rid of the goddam mozzies. 

 

Our neighborhood gets a bit deserted at night, as we discovered on our nightly quest for food we can eat.  Unlike Bangkok, the people who know English here know it very well.  But most people don:t, and almost none of the restaurants around here have English anywhere.  We decided to play it safe and have 2 tuna maki rolls and a couple of pieces of salmon nigiri.  Safe, but also more expensive than the fanciest meal we ate in all of Thailand.  Good thing we still have more Oreos. 

 

Tomorrow we start exploring the city.  We'll try our best to fit in, but since we pretty much still just have our Thailand clothes, I don' know how well that is going to work out in this uber trendy town.  We plan to go to the big neighborhoods and be wowed by how busy it is, all the while making sure to appreciate how incredibly high tech every little detail is.  Like the wireless pdf ordering system the sushi place had.  The waitress pressed a couple of buttons on her handheld pad and before she even left the table the grey haired sushi-chef that I'm pretty sure I heard call me Daniel-son had started rolling our tuna.  Hopefully we'll manage to take in a national sporting event.  There are no sumo tournaments this month, so we're planning on catching their other big ticket here.  It's this funny version of cricket I'm pretty sure they call baseball.  These countries come up with the darndest ideas.  Our first attempts to buy tickets online were thwarted by a lack of an English website, but I'm sure if we just show up at the stadium it'll all work out.  There are also a couple of big Buddhist temples in town, which will be a nice new experience for us.  Maybe tomorrow night we'll go to the entertainment district and check out some empty orchestras.  I hear they are hauntingly beautiful. 

 

Our schedule is filling up fast, we'll be sure to let you know how it all goes. 

 

By the way, is anybody in NY free around noon on Thursday?  Dov? 

Photos

Photos from Tao -  Hopefully we can put up the diving pics when we develop the film.  Gotta get one of those underwater digital cameras.

 

http://picasaweb.google.com/lapert/KoTao#

 

 

Bangkok is a whole different place when you're actually trying to spend money.  And when you're taken around by a local.  I really wish I knew what it is that is different about us now, but we're approached differently by the touts this time around.  Do we really look that much more impatient now?  Or did we really look that clueless back then?  I'm guessing a bit more of the latter.  Not to say they completely leave us alone - we should be so lucky.  There are just fewer that bother with us and they seem to give up a bit earlier.  Whatever it is, I'm not going to complain.

 

Shabbat in Bangkok seemed to explode since the last time we were here.  There were hundred more people this time and they even ran out of challah rolls by lunch!  We never did quite figure out why that one Israeli backpacker was walking the halls in just his boxers, but it didn't seem to phase the staff too much.  Perhaps it was not his first time. We ran into some nice Israelis (seriously) that we had met in Chiang Mai and compared stories for the rest of Shabbat.  More importantly, we finally had ourselves some meat!!  Vegetarians claim they feel so much better than when they ate meat.  I don't see it.  Now we're just counting down the days until we can eat some good meat.  Seriously, Adam.

 

Flight leaves at 6:30 AM for Tokyo, so I'm waiting around while Adina naps.  I may go back and fix up/add captions to some of the older albums on picasa, so give it a look.  Or at least pretend you did when we ask.

 

We've got three days to explore Tokyo before heading back to the states on Thursday (and traveling back in time as we do.  Take off at 11, land at 10:45 -  amazing!!)  Don't worry though, we've still got two more weeks of fun after that before heading home.  Do they have internet cafes in Acadia?

 

 

Full Moon Party

We're up late tonight.

 

For those of you that are not aware of this phenomenon, some places in Thailand have what is called a full moon party.  Each month, masses of people gather to party all night long, try out new kinds of music and drugs, stumble home semi-conscious at 7 AM and start figuring out what happened to their pants.  The biggest of these parties takes place on Koh Phangan, one of the three islands in the Samui archipelego where we have been for the last 10 days.  So as the hordes of people left our beach on Koh Tao to be ferried over to the party, what else were we to do but pack up our bags and bust ass in the opposite direction?  Tempting as the party may have been (which, as it turns out, was not all that tempting), we had to get back to Bangkok before Shabbat in order to catch our flight at dawn on Sunday.  So while the boats heading south were busting at the seams, we took a nice empty ferry and overnight bus back up north.  Well, it was supposed to be an overnight bus, but when it arrives in Bangkok at 3:20 in the morning, it should probably call itself a middle of the night bus.  Since the guest houses will charge us an extra night if we check in before 5 (because some one else may show up in the next hour and pay them for the empty room.  Really.) , we've got some time to kill. 

 

Our last 24 hours on Koh Tao were eventful.  We started with our first night dive, which exactly half of us really liked.  I liked the feeling of floating in the dark and watching the fish come in and out of the light from our torch, but Adina got a bit frustrated because she kept missing the cool things floating around us.  I saw a couple of spotted rays, some skittish shrimp, a HUGE crab, and when we shut off our lights and ran our hands through the water we churned up tons of neon green glow in the dark plankton.  The full moon shining through the waves above us was also pretty cool, as was the boat engine passing overhead in the dark.  Even though you know your 45 feet underwater, it's a bit weird to suddenly hear a loud roar encompass the space all around you.  Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure our guide was doped up on something, we managed to come out of the water alive.

 

Thursday we spent our time back in the water, albeit at the surface this time.  We went to Koh Nangyuan, a privately owned mini-island just of the coast (privately owned by jackasses who like to overcharge for everything) and climbed a small lookout point, then snorkeled in the water.  The island was gorgeous and the snorkeling was terrific.  Not the same as being under the water, but close enough.  After leaving the island (then discovering we were on the wrong boat, heading back to the island, finding the right boat, and leaving the island again) we packed up our bags, bought the requisite magnet, and caught our ferry.  After 10 days in the islands we've relaxed a bunch, taken in the beautiful scenery, learned to dive, and downgraded ourselves from blindingly white to startlingly pasty.  All in all, I'd call it a pretty successful leg of our trip.

 

Now if only the minutes would tick away a bit faster so we could get into Chabbad and get ourselves some meat.........

 

 

1800 Centimeters Under the Sea

Congratulations are in order -- Adina and I are now certified open water divers!!  (All that's left now is a pilot's license.  What are the odds that Adina lets that happen?)  We finished our four day class today with two more dives in the ocean.  Tomorrow we're doing our fist adventure dive, the next step towards and advanced open water license.  We'll try out a night dive where we get to see rays, glow in the dark plankton, and more cool stuff that doesn't come out much during the day.  We're also hoping the weather gets better so we can go to the west side of the island where the diving is a bit more interesting.  So far choppy waters have kept us on the east.  Not that we're complaining, we've been blown away and especially since we have no basis for comparison we think it's been amazing.  Our first two dives I did have a bit of  trouble equalizing my ears (getting them to not feel like they're being squeezed into my head), but today I woke up with a funny feeling in my ears.  It turns out that funny feeling was the feeling of being clear of congestion, something I really haven't experienced in about 10 years.  Since it's the congestion that gets in the way of clearing the pressure, today was a breeze and we got as deep as 18 meters (we really need to pick up the metric system back home) which is as much as we're allowed to until we get deep water certification.  Some highlights of the dive include triggerfish (which we avoided because they have a funny way of snapping at fingers when they feel threatened), sea cucumbers, (holy) barracudas, fully grown hammerhead sharks (only kidding), juvenile sweetlips (not kidding), boxfish, some cool dude with a beak whose name I don't know but assume involves the word beak, pointy sea urchins, and coral.  Lots of coral. 

 

In other news.....there is no other news on this island.  It is all diving, all the time.  Other activities include swimming in the ocean, snorkeling, or sitting on a pier watching people dive, snorkel, or swim.  Of course there is also hiking to a dive site, renting an ATV and driving to a dive site, or riding in a boat to a dive site.  And bowling.  We did finish up our free stint in the bungalow/sauna, so we moved into the attached hotel with gorgeous AC rooms, albeit slightly strangely arranged,  Adina keeps asking why they bother having a door to the bathroom if the wall separating it from the bedroom has a giant square cut out of it.  Hopefully Borne Supremacy will be on HBO again tonight so we can really enjoy it.  The rest of our time here has been spent hunting an elusive veggie restaurant which apparently used to stand in that spot where all the cinderblocks are now.  D'oh.

 

After tomorrow's night dive we may do one more Thursday morning before another overnight journey, this time back to Bangkok.  There it's Shabbat at chabbad, shopping till we drop (or run out of money), then head to the airport in the middle of the night for our flight to Tokyo.  We're trying to prepare ourselves for a giant culture shock, but then again maybe the busiest and fastest city on the planet won't be all that different from Thai beach island paradise that we've gotten used to.  Here's hoping.

 

Oh, and in case it hasn't become apparent yet, we were not on the Thai airplane that crashed today. 

 

Till next time...we'll say hello to Nemo for you.

 

 

Photos!!

We've had some time to update photos (mostly courtesy of nothing better to do on a fast day), so by all means, enjoy!

 

Siem Reap

http://picasaweb.google.com/lapert/SiemReap#

 

Phnom Phen

http://picasaweb.google.com/lapert/PhnomPhen

 

Ko Samui

http://picasaweb.google.com/lapert/KoSamui

 

 

We spent Shabbat this week at a nice new resort connected to our dive place.  The resort has beautiful rooms with great air conditioning and LCD HDTV.  Sadly, we're in the bungalows nearby without tv (or hot water, but it's pretty hot here anyway so perhaps we'll get used to that).  They are called fan rooms, which is the nice way of saying there's no AC, but a weak fan that blows hot air around the room and squeaks all night.  The ambient noises of the garden and nearby beach are pretty soothing, though kind of broken up by the dueling Australians coming home from a pleasant night out at 6 AM.  I'm not sure what they were arguing over (Adina thinks it was a girl), but I did get a good idea of exactly what each one felt the other can fucking do to himself.  It was like getting caught between Danny and Tali Stein, circa 2001.  The price of the room is right, though, since we get the room for free with the diving course.  Since we couldn't bear to stay in the room all day, we had a much more active shabbat than usual, we managed to walk up and down the beach.  A lot.  And we finished our reading assignment for the diving course, making us perhaps the first people ever to do so.

 

We head back to the classroom, then to the pool tomorrow for more learning.  Then Monday and Tuesday it's into the ocean we go!!  Wish us luck!

 

 

 

PS - I fogot to mention one of the coolest things we've ever seen on my last post.  On our second night on  Samui we were sitting on our beach waiting for a non-existent sunset (turns out the beach faces the wrong way) but we did see a tornado form over water a few miles off shore.  Apparently this is called a waterspout (thanks, wikipedia) and was pretty harmless because it moves really slowly and stays offshore.  Though I'm pretty sure if I were captain of the idiot yachts that were getting really close I would have stepped back a bit.  Pictures are in the gallery.