Archive for January, 2009

By now I’ve visited two Onsen, Yudanaka Onsen Seifuso and Korakukan Jigokudani. Both have been wonderful although I would have to say I prefer Yudanaka Onsen Seifuso if I had to choose. Onsen by nature are somewhat smelly, in that they expel a mild sulfer-ish stench. It not overwhelming, although you never quite acclimatize to the sulfur smell. Yudanaka Onsen Seifuso had a Onsen which didn’t have as much minerals in the water, which lended a more pleasant experience in my opinion, the water was also warmer. Korakukan Jigokudani had a more “natural” Onsen, and although I did enjoy myself the outdoor Onesen was rather difficult to get used to. Matt was insistent that I join him outside, which I eventually did, however the thought of monkey poo infecting my penis never quite escaped me. I know that there was no chance of inoculating myself with microbes due to money refuse, however working in microbiology I couldn’t let the thought escape me. Overall both were fun and I would definitely partake again if I had a chance. Aside from the nudity and money poo, the experience was fantastic.

If there is a re-occurring theme of this trip, it would be walking and sometimes running. Each day we’ve both walked at least 5 miles or more, sometimes with all our luggage. Its very similar to what my Europe trip was like about a year ago, walking everywhere and rushing all the time. This isn’t a bad thing, since I can eat anything I want and I’ll burn the calories right away. However my travel companion, Matt, walks at an insane pace. At times is difficult to keep up with him, I’m worried later on he’s going to speed walk his way into getting us lost. In any case, yesterday was our last day in Tokyo.

View of Mt. Fukji from Fujiyoshida

We first visited Fujiyoshida to view Mt. Fuji, and then later on headed to our first Ryokan, Yudanaka Onsen Seifuso. Fujiyoshida was great, we both got some great views of Mt Fuji and we were able to visit the Fuji Sengen Shrine. Fuji Sengen was about as large as the shrine in Tokyo, however it wasn’t crowded at all and was filled with fantastic sacred trees as well as deer and crows. We were even able to glimpse the priest as he preformed an unknown ceremony for a couple, and Miko (shrine maiden) selling Omamori charms. Later, per the recommendation of the tourist attendant (in Japanese no less, thanks to Matt), we found a very small and local Udon Noodle restaurant. Our noodles were only 350 Yen, and the restaurant was basically in the lower level of someones house. It was a fun experience, especially when one of the younger girls who lived there kept on saying “bye bye” as we left. Both of us (especially myself) are still getting used to all the nuances of Japanese culture. For example at the Udon restaurant, our waitress re-arranged our shoes by the door so they were pointing out, this was something I was completely unaware of. After Fujiyoshida, we headed back for Tokyo to transfer to our Shinkansen. The only difficult part was our journey was rather tight as in we had little time between train transfers. This was rather stressful as we were running from one train to the other with all our luggage, during the middle of Tokyo rush hour. And to top of off, it took us nearly an hour to find our Ryokan in the dark despite being 5min away from the train station, however I was finally able to locate the building using my iPhone.
Since we arrived late, we ate dinner on the train and settled into our room after we arrived. It was amazingly large by Japan standards, and later that night both of us ventured into the Onsen despite myself being extremely worried about accidentally going into the womens bath. Everything went fine though and was a very pleasant experience. Breakfast was traditional Japanese, and our hostess was very nice and even gave us a bus schedule and two apples for the road when we left.

Japanese Snow Macaques bathing in the onsen.

Today we’re staying at our second Ryokan, Korakukan Jigokudani. We arrived via a 1.5K walk on a trail covered with ice and oddly enough Australians. At our fist Ryokan, I was convinced we were perhaps the only guests, however here there are quite a few foreigners, especially loud annoying Australians. Another odd find is a wireless internet connection (which I’m using right now), considering I’m in the middle of nowhere with monkeys. I believe this is the only place where you can actually walk right up to Snow Monkeys in their natural habitat.

P.S. If you want to see more pictures from my trip so far, I’ve added a bunch of pictures from my trip on Flickr.

Although I still haven’t written about the first day in Tokyo, I’ll skip ahead a bit to our Ghibli Museum and Akihabara visit. The Ghibli museum was a must when we first began planning this trip and required us to purchase our tickets ahead of time as they cannot be purchased at the museum. The entire complex is located within a park, only a small sign indicates where the entrance is. We handed our voucher to the attendant standing outside the entrance, who then greeted us, talked into a two-way radio to let the front desk know we had arrived, and escorted us the the entrance. The entire process was very personalized and seemed rather odd. The complex itself is odd as well, some doors are extremely short, and generally everything is designed with children in mind. To get a better idea, I would suggest watching this video tour since we were not permitted to take pictures inside. I especially enjoyed the areas which re-created the working environments of an animation studio, which also included many original drawings and cels. In my opinion the Ghibli museum far surpassed anything Disney has in the states, everything is authentic yet directly oriented towards children.

Next on our list was Union Commerce, located in a kitchen wares district of Tokyo. I wanted to either purchase a Chef’s knife or a special type of coffee maker After struggling to find the store front, Matt was able to somehow direct us to the right location despite not having an accurate location. Although the knives at Union Commerce did look fantastic, I just could not justify the $300 for a Chef’s knife especially since I’m on a rather tight budget. The adjacent store however did have the siphon coffee maker I was looking for, which I purchased. As far as I can tell, these are only readily available in Japan and the one I purchased seemed to be a great deal. The shop attendant was very helpful despite the language barrier, and offered us both complementary espresso.

Lastly on our list was Akihabara, the electronics/anime central of Tokyo.

Some of our purchases from Akihabara.

Although we did visit Akihabara the day before, we were only able to scratch the surface of what was actually there. Both Matt and I had specific purchases in mind, so we set off looking through DVD stores. It should be noted this is a rather dangerous undertaking considering neither of us can read Kanji well, many of the stores are ero (porn) oriented. Subsequently some of the stores we left immediately, this proved to be very frustrating as we had no idea which store to visit and which to avoid. In any case I was able to find a box set and the second DVD of Bamboo Blade for an amazing price, and Matt was ale to find a few sound tracks. In keeping with the theme of Akihabara, we decided to visit a Maid Cafe after our search was over.

An advertisement for a Maid Cafe. If your walking in Akihabara, girls dressed as Maids will hand these out to promote their various cafes.

Although both of us were somewhat adverse to visiting one of these establishments, we decided we should give it a go since we were in Akihabara and it would be a good cultural experience. For those of you who don’t know what a Maid Cafe is, basically its a cafe run by waitresses dressed in French Maid costume (or cosplay), who will serve you and generally keep lonely Japanese guys company. There was a Maid Cafe somewhere that had a special To Aru Majutsu No Index/Toradora cosplay this weekend, although sadly we were unable to locate it. We did however visit another cafe, and although the experience was rather strange and uncomfortable at times (our maid did not speak any English) it was entertaining and quiet an experience. I’m not sure if would do it again, perhaps at another cafe in Tokyo, however if such a place existed at home it would not be a repeated visit. The picture is one of many adds being handed out by maids in Akihabara, although some seemed rather dubious (and expensive), as the one pictured is advertised as a “relaxation salon”. It far to late to write further, especially since tomorrow we leave for Fuji!

This will be rather brief as its really early here in Tokyo and I’m trying to get used to the time difference. First off, the F-Class flights went well, it was fun to see how the other half flies. Especially the SEA-NRT leg was great. In WBC they provide slippers, hot towels, tons of food (and a snack bar), wine, champagne before pushback, and a massaging bed chair. The A330 was fun to ride in, and when I landed in NRT I saw the Delta 747 now in Delta livery. Other then being bumpy at time, I was able to sleep most of the way so hopefully minimizing my jet lag.

Thats all I have to say about my flight for now, I have a few more pictures but my iPhone isn’t cooperating at the moment. And to top it off I got my Flickr account locked, so I was forced to open a new account. After I landed customs was a breeze, NRT wasn’t busy at all and was able to find Matt F easily. The Narita Express took about 60min to get to Shinjuku, where we found our hotel and headed off to get some dinner. We picked the cheapest place we could find with the most locals. After trying to figure out the damn machine to buy our ticket (in some places you buy a ticket which to hand to the waitress), we sat down and ate. I apparently ordered beef curry, although I thought I had pressed a different button. It was tasty and a welcome hot meal. I thought it was funny how when one of the workers in the back broke some dishes, they were quick to apologize for the inconvenience.

Anyways, hopefully I’ll be able to get some pictures up later as Flickr is not working at the moment.

Finally the day is almost here, in fact Matt F is already on his way to Japan as I write.  I have to say these last few days have been rather hectic, and in all honesty I’m not completely ready for tomorrow.  Neither am I looking forward to a 16+ hour itinerary with two layovers, three separate flights, and an hour train ride.  Here is a list of crap I still need to take care of:

• Find another Wells Fargo to get more Yen
• Trip to Barnes&Noble to pick up some reading material
• Fill my car up with gas and give her a wash
• Ongoing website work
• And oh yeah . . . Pack

There’s plenty of other items I probably need to address, but oh well.  And to top if off I have to get up at 3:30am tomorrow to catch my flight.  Yeah, this cant miss.

In preparation for my trip, I decided to sample various types of sake since I was planning on visiting a sake brewery while I was in Tokyo. First off, I know absolutely NOTHING about sake, other then it derived from fermented rice. Being a vinophile, I incorrectly thought the transition to sake would be a pleasant experience. On the contrary. Yesterday I sampled three types, Nigorizake (濁り酒) or “cloudy” sake, and two other generic brands (one even came with its own cup!). In my opinion, it tastes like drinking sweet rice (who would’ve thought) and combined with the high alcohol content (up to 20%), was way too hot for my palate. Moreover the “cloudy” sake didn’t have the best appearance in the glass and I was probably drinking it at the wrong temperature anyways. If I do get the chance I’ll be sure to try sake again, especially in Japan, although as far as daily consumption goes sake will remain an un-acquired taste.

For one of my projects, atfe.org, I use a WordPress MU installation with a BuddyPress installation on top to provide social networking features. This site, however, is more professionally oriented and therefore I wanted to change references such as “Friends” to “Contacts” and so forth. As I didn’t want to change every line of code that contained “Friends”, so I opted to modify a language translation for both BuddyPress and WordPress MU.

When I was first researching how to do this, I was absolutely astonished at how misleading and vague documentation was regarding this. Forms regarding this topic were devoid of a direct approach on how to install these language files, in fact I was only able to figure out how to accomplish this by downloading different BuddyPress language installations and reading the original WordPress documentation. Hopefully this will save someone the pain and time of having to sift through various hints and tips and digging through documentation. Below is a direct approach on how to accomplish a simple translation for BuddyPress, this is not an in-depth tutorial and more information on WordPress translations can be found here.

1. First step is to download translation software, I myself chose poEdit since it has an OSX version. There are other editors avalable here from the WordPress site.
2. Download the official WordPress POT file and open it in poEdit.
3. Once open, save the file as en_US.po, opEdit will automatically create en_US.mo in the same directory.
4. Next step is to modify the buddypress.po file to your liking. Locate this file in your BuddyPress installation under /wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-languages/ and open it using poEdit.
5. Make the changes you want, for example I “translated” My Friends to My Contacts.
6. Save the file as buddypress-en_US.po, again poEdit should automatically create buddypress-en_US.mo in the same directory.
7. Log in to your WordPress MU admin page. Make sure the “American English” is selected in both Settings->General and Site Admin->Options.
8. Check your BuddyPress profile, My Friends should now read My Contacts.

Contrary to forms on the BuddyPress site, you do NOT have to edit your wp-config.php file, nor do you have to create a language directory in wp-includes. If you update your BP installation, make sure to check the new buddypress.po file to be sure no changes have been made from the previous version.

Track of NW7 on January 1st 2009, Flight Aware also showed the pilot constantly changing his altitude to avoid turbulence. Flight path taken from Flight Stats.

I enjoy flying, and have been a loyal Northwest customer for quite some time and typically have not been disappointed with their international service (in flight mind you, their customer support is something else). In fact this past January, I was quite impressed with their new A330-300 AVOD, as well as the free drinks and newspapers on a flight to Amsterdam (NW42). I was even able to power my laptop with the provided power outlet the entire flight back. Some of my previous trips to Hawaii on their old DC-10 and 757′s were less then desirable, however for my upcoming trip I made sure to get a reservation on their more recent fleet of A330-200 aircraft.

When I previously posted about my flight reservation, I failed to get a WBC seat due despite my best efforts using my extra WorldPerks miles I’d accrued over the years. I tried talking with a representative, I even drove to the airport but to no avail. The seats appeared on nwa.com, however whenever I tried to complete my reservation I would get ambiguous error messages (error 180 and 105) and whoever I talked to simply refused to acknowledge those options existed. I finally gave up and made a coach reservation, just to be sure I had a flight lined up. Later, in early December, I decided to check back to see if it was possible to upgrade my seat. Amazingly, a spot opened on nwa.com and I was able to upgrade to WBC for the flight out. Ever since then I’ve been doing research on frequent flyer programs, and have decided to go with Delta Skymiles in the future. Eventually Northwest will be absorbed into Delta, so all the major routs I fly will be covered by them. Additionally, Delta’s business class will be upgraded soon with lie flat seats, and most of their international aircraft are equipped with power outlets even in coach class, with AVOD, as opposed to United or Continental. I just hope Northwest’s customer support is either improved or replaced with new direction from Delta.

Although NW7 has had an elevated level of delays recently, hopefully when my flight rolls around things will be going smoothly enough so as not to cause any issues, perhaps I’ll even be able to post a trip report. As of January 7th, NW7 holds a pathetic .2 out of 5 rating for timeliness.