Posts Tagged ‘Japan 2009’

Because of my continued jet lag, I’ve been unable to update this blog as frequently as I had hoped after my return. Even after a few days of being back home my biological clock refuses to set itself. This means I wake up at 3-4am, go to work insanely early, return home and shortly thereafter go to bed. I blame my persistent jet lag on my lab, which has no windows and the weather which has been overcast all week. Anyways, for everyone anyone waiting, here is my first post of many to come regarding my trip to Japan!

Yudanaka Onsen Seifuso

This was the first Ryokan experience we had in Japan. The one bit of advice I would give for anyone venturing to this Ryokan is to get a detailed map of where its located (google maps seemed to work well). By foot, its about a 3-5min walk from the train station, however its rather difficult to determine which Ryokan you should enter since most don’t have english signage. Thankfully, with my iPhone and comparing the Kanji on a few signs we were able do locate our Ryokan after some searching. The fantastic kotatsu in our guest room. Some reviews on Japanese Guest Houses claimed the rooms were not "immaculate", however I was more than satisfied with their cleanliness. Our room was much larger than I had expected, about 14 tatmi mats, and included a kotatsu which was fantastic. Even though we arrived rather late, I was able to try the outdoor onsen (my first Japanese onsen experience). Although I was slightly adverse at being naked, the outdoor bath was great and quite soothing. The staff were extremely nice and helpful, and breakfast the next morning was one of the best Japanese breakfasts I’ve had. On our way out, they provided us with a map to the monkey park as well as some apples for the road. I highly recommend this Ryokan to anyone considering it. The building is beautiful with the courtyard garden, and with two onsen baths there’s always one open for each gender.

Korakukan Jigokudani

This was our second Ryokan; we were going to stay here for two nights however they wouldn’t let us check in late.  The hike to the Ryokan is about 1.8Km by foot, although I believe there is a road that will bring you closer however this is closed in the winter.  This is completely unnecessary however; the walk was nice despite the layer of ice that had formed.  Thankfully the weather was nice although it if were snowing I could imagine the hike to be much more treacherous.  The building itself was interesting, and as many had commented before, seemed like parts were falling into disrepair.  This added to its character however, and once again our room was nice and large with a fantastic view of the valley leading up to the monkey park. Once we had settled in we headed to the monkey park, a short walk from the Ryokan.  I believe the entrance fee was around $10, however it was worth every penny as Trail leading to Korakukan Jigokudani. this is the only place in the world that you can get within feet of “wild” Japanese Snow Macaques.  The park itself is rather small compared to what I had expected, there is a small waiting room with some souvenirs and, ironically enough, an open WiFi access point.  Amazingly enough I was even able to connect while I was at the Ryokan with my Eee PC, although it was a rather weak signal.  Dinner was great, and included crickets which I did try.  They weren’t bad at all, I believe they were cooked in some soy sauce, although I had a hard time getting my mind off the fact they were crickets.   Later that evening we tried the onsen, which smelled slightly of sulfur however this was expected.  The indoor onsen was more to my liking; there was also an outdoor one that was in full view to anyone on the trail to the monkey park.  I was slightly hesitant to try the outdoor onsen, since as I mentioned previously monkeys did use it often and I was afraid of infecting myself with monkey poo.  No need to worry, its been about two weeks and I still feel fine to the best of my knowledge.  It was very soothing for the short time I spent outside and on a clear night the view of the stars is fantastic and well worth the naked walk outside.  If your planning on going to this Ryokan I would recommend going for one night, as the monkey park can easily be covered within 1-2 hours and any other attractions are a 1.8km hike away.  Although slightly run down, it was quite an experience and well with the trip.

Hyatt Regency Kyoto

Viewing Bamboo Blade on the guest room TV. In contrast to the Hakata Green I, the Hyatt Regency Kyoto is one of the best hotels I’ve stayed at.  The service was amazing and the guest room was immaculate and brand new (I believe the hotel opened on 2007).  The best part was they included a 42inch flat panel TV, along with a DVD player which allowed us to sample some of our Akihabara purchases.  When we arrived bellhops with white gloves were quick to take our bags and lead us to our room once we had checked in.  They were even kind enough to show us how to use the TV and other things in our room, and asked us if we’d like a newspaper delivered in the morning.  The mini bar was expectedly full and we filled out the card for breakfast to be delivered the following morning.  The bathroom was the best part, with a deep Japanese soaking tub and shower, which I immediately used.  There was even a personalized letter from the manager with the weather forecast for the next few days   The next morning when we checked out they called a taxi for us, which was compensated, and told us when we returned the day One of the best parts about the Hyatt, the bathroom. after the taxi from the station would also be compensated.  Even though Matt absolutely loathed the Hyatt because of their ridiculous and possibly intrusive service, I was extremely impressed.  If I even stay in Kyoto again I’ll be sure to stay at the Hyatt.  Their prices are rather steep, expect to pay about $40 for a “garden” breakfast which is basically an nice assortment of pastries, fruit, and coffee or tea.  However, like I said, you get what you pay for and in this case much of that is service and amenities.

Fushimi Inari Shrine with literally thousands of Tori.

So far, internet has been rather easy to come by at least while we were staying in Tokyo. Even in the Monkey Park, literally in the middle of no where, I was able to somehow find a wireless access point and check my email and update this blog. However since arriving at Fukuoka I have been unable to find a reliable internet connection. The hotel we stayed at, Hakata Green 1 (yes, there is a Green 2), did not have a connection and the Hyatt Regency has pay internet which I refuse to use.
Anyhow, I have to say Fukuoka was somewhat of a disappointment. This is somewhat my fault, as the week before I left I was extremely busy and simply unable to plan sights for Fukuoka. The weather was also rather poor, the day we arrived it was raining off and on and rather cold. The restaurant I had planned for, the Hidden Kitchen, was unable to seat us since we didn’t have reservations (this was also my fault), and we ended up going to see a movie, Revolutionary Road, which was good but depressing. We also managed to walk through the red light district in Fukuoka by accident, which was rather un-pleasant. We did take a recommended day trip to Daifuzu which was a success aside from continued poor weather.

Today we arrived in Kyoto and so far our previous success has returned. We were able to see all the shrines and temples on our list, and the Imperial Palace. I was able to get some fantastic pictures of Kyoto, and for all you anime fans I took some pictures of Fushimi Inari Shrine (Denno Coil anyone?). Sadly, we were unable to get into the shrine nearby which proportionally was the “love” shrine. If you could walk between two rocks 30m apart blind, you were destined to find someone. Anyways I have a ton more to write about, however since I don’t have nearly enough time I’ll be adding some more posts once I arrive home on the 8th.

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!

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.

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.

In preparation for my upcoming trip, I’ve migrated my entire site over to WordPress MU.  This seemed to be the best solution, since this section was developing into its own blog and some feature required it to be on a separate WordPress installation from my main site.  Although the process as not as easy as I expected, everything was migrated and put in place.  For those of you who are curious, I ended up exporting my posts in XML using the built in WordPress feature instead of moving the MySQL tables over.  This proved an easy solution, however if your site is larger with more content, I would recommend another solution involving moving your MySQL tables over.  This new section for my blog includes a revised theme, along with a bunch of other blog features such as Flickr integration.  I also enabled comments on this post, after activating my Akismet plugin.

With less then a month until I leave, I’ve nearly completed all the necessary reservations.  I was even able to snag first class on the flight over, although this came at a price since I now have two layovers.  Hopefully before I leave I’ll get some time to add an image gallery and some other features.

As previously alluded to, my plans to travel to Japan are finally becoming a reality.  I recently reserved my tickets from naw.com, which was an adventure in of it self, sadly World Business Class was not an option (on my particular departure date).  Thankfully I was able to get myself on a A330-200 instead of the older 747-400.  This means a more up to date cabin with media councils in each seat; as well as a power outlet in the front economy rows to power my laptop.  Aside from the two layovers I have on the way over, the whole ordeal should not be that unbearable.

Back to the trip itself,  I’ll be gone for two weeks touring the entire country, from Fukuoka to Sapporo.  As of right now there are many details that have not been determined yet, however I do plan to document the trip on my site once the time comes.  Hopefully more pictures and more posts then my previous trips to Europe and Hawaii this past year, now that I’m finally graduated there is much less stress in my life.