JAPAN (part 1)
Oct. 16th, 2008 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fluffymarkFlying to Japan on the cheap via a very quick change at Helsinki, as Finnair had some amazing mega-cheap flights. And the service on Finnair very impressive. Sleep on the flight predictably failed to happen (I always get hyper when travelling, just CANNOT sleep) despite attempts and drinking all the wine in the world on the flight. Arrival in Nagoya was fantastic, swooping in low over the mountains and landing in an artificial island out in the middle of the bay. Japan Immigration frustratingly slow - they had a single desk open for us foreigners, and they insist on photographing and fingerprinting everyone. I was about the 6th person off the plane, but still took me 30 minutes to clear immigration. Once outside airport, Lovely beautiful sunny day, very tempting mountains on the horizon all around. I was in Japan, and everything was perfect! :)
Bought a train ticket to the mainland - panicked when i couldn’t understand anything on it, but managed to have a meaningful conversation (in Japanese!) with a nice Japanese lady who pointed me at the correct carriage and seat. Train had a camera on the front and lots of screens everywhere showing you the driver’s view and the speed - lots of geek points for the Japanese and their lovely trains. Nagoya itself is a post-industrial wasteland. Which I’m sure some of you would love, but the only thing of interest to me there, the Robot Museum, sadly closed last year. So I collected my Japan Rail Pass (free train travel for a week!) and headed for the tempting mountains, hopping on a Shinano train to the town of Matsumoto. The train was nice and spoke very polite English, telling me where I was and where I was going. The view from the train was gorgeous, absolutely the best views from a train I’ve ever seen - lots of mountains and tunnels and bridges and rivers. Japan has two types of land - flat, where it’s all built on, and mountainous, where it’s all heavily forested. It makes for a compelling and strange contrast. I wasn’t so lucky with the food - in an optimistic gamble I’d picked up an ekiben - or MYSTERY BENTO LUNCH as I prefer to call it - probably not so mystery if you can read the Kanji, but for me it was mystery food. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that nice, although it was very filling, and I needed to eat something to keep me awake by then! I’d been awake for over 24 hours now and the power-lines were mesmerising me by this stage.
Matsumoto is a castle town, and the castle is where I headed first. Japanese castles are not like English ones - as they look a bit like this and they make you take your shoes off to go inside! I was the only westerner there, which was obvious, the ceiling was too low for me - EVERYONE was being so nice and telling me politely to “mind my head” like it was the only 3 English words they knew. Climbing up some very fiddly small staircases, past some impressive displays of Samurai armour and Samurai swords and the like, I made it to the top, where there was to be found a nice view of mountains and a god protecting the castle (but only on the 26th night of the month). Leaving the castle, I then stumbled accidentally up a street full of frogs. I finally made it to the Museum of Art, where there’s an amazing avant-garde art display by Yayoi Kasuma involving lots of Polka-dots and I got lost in the Infinity Mirrored Room. I then went to my hostel and checked in, and they gave me free socks! That evening, I meant to find a big yummy sushi dinner, buy food for the mountains the next day, and go online. Instead, I fell asleep upon contact with my bed at 5pm. Ooops.
I woke before dawn, and headed for the station, looking for breakfast. Strangely enough, before 6am on a Sunday morning in a small town, nowhere is open. Buy a ticket for the first train of the day to Kamikochi. Hope I’m on the correct train, as this one is the small local Alpico train, and doesn’t speak English. Soon enough, the train becomes a bus travelling up high into mountains. Kamikochi itself is a tiny mountain resort in a valley at 1500m above sea level, surrounded by huge mountain peaks. Am overjoyed to find a shop, so quickly buy lunch snacks for later, and a large sushi breakfast, which I eat sitting on the banks of the Azusa river, admiring the pretty view. I ask at the info office for advice on hiking, and get pointed to one of the trails. Powered by Inari, I zoom off up the trail. Like everywhere else, but possibly more so in Japan, it’s polite to greet other hikers as you pass, so there was frequent calls of “Ohayo gozaimasu” and “Konnichiwa” (and even the occasional “Good Morning” - but I still responded in Japanese back at them) as I passed. I even found my first westerner since I’d left the airport, who responded to my “Konnichiwa” with “Are you from Manchester?” (apparently I speak Japanese in a Northern English accent. Good good!). I’m climbing through a thick forest and the path is VERY STEEP, way steeper than I was expecting, and doesn’t stop being VERY STEEP. There are scary drops at both sides, and there are frequent wooden fixes to the path where the path has collapsed down the mountainside but I keep going, even if I can’t see where I’m going or where I am. 2 hours later, I emerge above the tree-line, and find myself ON TOP OF THE RIDGE I was admiring while I had breakfast. I keep heading up the ridge, and finally summit at Nishiho-doppyo, 2700m above sea level, a climb of 1200m in about 2 and a half hours. The view is nothing short of spectacular. Never climbed so high in my life, and I wasn’t expecting to do so that day (I thought I’d have a easy pleasant walk but not a HUGE CLIMB). Celebrated by eating lunch, and then headed down, pausing to buy and consume beer from a vending machine at 2500m. Yes, that’s right, in Japan, they have Beer Vending machines, which is strange enough, but even in the middle of nowhere on a mountain? Got down, legs felt dead by then, returned back to Matsumoto and while I was starving for a huge meal, collapsed asleep in bed at 8pm.
Monday morning I still felt dead, but was up late enough (7am) to be fed free breakfast at the hostel - Miso soup and Onigiri, and it tasted amazing (or maybe I was SO HUNGRY anything would have tasted amazing). Then to the station to hop on the fast Super-Azusa train to Shinjuku (Tokyo). More tunnels and spectacular views of mountains, except ... it now started to rain. It was supposed to be the wet season in Japan, and I guess I’d been lucky with the clear and sunny weather in the mountains. So I arrived in Tokyo in the pouring rain. Staying in Tokyo at the “Khaosan Ninja” hostel, a hostel full of Ninjas (and very cheap rooms, free coffee and free internet), where I’d arranged to meet
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squirmelia, just fresh off her plane from London. With mobile phones not working in Japan, the meeting up had a chance of going horribly wrong, but it all went smoothly, and she arrived at the hostel barely 5 minutes after I did, with two huge bags in tow, containing her entire life. Our room was still being cleaned, but they let us drop off the bags, and we went to explore Tokyo. Tokyo has lovely musical trains that play different tunes upon arrival at different stations. We got a bit lost in Shinjuku station trying to find ... THE WAY OUT. Many large Japanese stations have shopping malls attached to them, or seem to be shopping malls, and actually trying to find an exit outside to the street is a bit complicated! Shinjuku has impressive skyscrapers you can view from an free observation floor at the top of the metropolitan governement building. Or it would have been a good view had it not been raining - it was still a nice view, but not the panorama over Tokyo it should have been. I somehow managed to correctly buy stamps, and even used a Japanese cash machine without disaster. By now Jodi was on the point of sleep-deprivation collapse, so we headed back to the hostel for her to have a nap. I planned to head out to museums, but felt ill (I was covered in red splodges!), it was raining, so stayed in the nice hostel kitchen drinking free coffee while flooping at one of the low Japanese tables that you kneel on a cushion to use. Later on, we investigated the scariness that is Japanese supermarkets (just how much strange food can you get in one place!?) and wandered into Akihabara, the electric town of Tokyo. Haven for Otaku, at night it is all lit up with large neon light displays of anime characters, and we found some entertaining vending machines selling Neon Genesis Evangelion anime figureines and plastic pizza slices.Tuesday we’d planned to go to Hakone for views of Mount Fuji but that’s a very outdoor place, and it was still raining, so it would have been wet and pointless really. So we hit the shops at Ginza instead. Specifically, we got very lost and distracted in a toy shop. Toy shops in Japan are like nowhere else. So many gadgets and gizmos and STUFF. And upstairs there were GIANT CUDDLY TOTOROS and stuff from all the Ghibli animes and they even had a screen showing “My Neighbour Totoro” and it was all good. Imagine Hamleys gone insane, and you’d not be far off this shop. It was too much fun. We left Ginza, stumbled upon Cow Parade Tokyo quite by accident when we found Bondage Cow on a street corner. We found the imperial palace, which has a large impressive moat full of lovely fish, but the gardens are not so impressive. Or maybe the rain made them seem bad. The only good thing about the rain is Jodi’s cute frog umbrella, which produced many shouts of ”Kawaii“ from Japanese ladies we met. Later we headed for Shibuya, somehow found the vegan restaurant we were looking for (was nice and cheap!) and explored the lit up shops of Shibuya that evening, finding a shopping centre named after me, and getting very confused at labelling of music genres and ordering of albums in the local HMV, and getting unfathomably delighted at the exciting displays on the outside of Pachinko parlors.
And that’s all the strangeness I’ve time to write about now!
To follow later - more adventures in Japan including Bullet trains, Temple lodgings with real Buddhist monks, Spooky graveyards, Bamboo groves, Geishas, the Cat Bus and Totoro, Shark-fin soup Ice-cream, the Tokyo Tower and not enough sleep!
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Date: 2008-10-16 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 02:24 pm (UTC)Miss Tokyo and Japan already. I want to go back there on a much longer trip. So so much I want to do and see there. :)
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Date: 2008-10-20 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 12:59 am (UTC)Finnair, btw, is my favourite airline in the world. And i HATE those "metro malls", they have them in Taiwan too, you wind up walking all day through dreary catacombs of unglamorous shops and when you finally find the right exit it's the wrong exit and you're in another town already.
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Date: 2008-10-17 02:37 pm (UTC)I had wondered how you could afford to keep zooming between Norway and Taiwan all the time, and now I know. Is Finnair your secret? At least I know how to get to Japan cheaply now. :) And they have Fazer chocolate on flights, which always is a big plus for me. The only irritant is how the entertainment system cuts out when they are making an announcement, and they insist on announcing everything in Finnish, Swedish, English and Japanese. Aside from that, Finnair win totally. :)
I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by those evil station shopping malls. Some of them have about 50 exits, apparently, which seems absurd when you can't find ANY of them, and then the chances of finding the correct one is minimal. And then you've found you've walked all the way to the next station underground. Or something. Argh! When you have to walk through a shopping mall just to change lines, you can't help but think that possibly you're going the wrong way.
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Date: 2008-10-17 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 06:03 am (UTC)Really, ninjas?
Red splodges?! *hugs*
And people really do shout 'kawaii' at passers-by... this is... reassuring?
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Date: 2008-10-17 02:44 pm (UTC)Yes they really do shout "Kawaii" to random cute passers-by in Japan. I do love that country. :)
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Date: 2008-10-17 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 02:45 pm (UTC)I am very evil, thank you! *deep bow*
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Date: 2008-10-17 02:30 pm (UTC)BTW, did the cat-bus have testicles? 'Cos in the film it has testicles. I keep telling people this but they don't believe me and then I try to convince them for a long time and they say I'm obsessed. I found a plushie cat-bus in a department store the other day. No testicles.
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Date: 2008-10-17 02:50 pm (UTC)Cat-bus testicles? Um ... I've only seen the film once, and can't recall - maybe you're right? The Cat-bus I went on that moved had an exhaust pipe. The Cat-bus inside the Ghibli museum was so covered in small children I couldn't get close. The plushy Cat-bus toys in the shops definitely don't, as you say. I'm inclined to say no, but I think I should watch the film again. I think we need to know the answer! :)
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Date: 2008-10-18 01:04 pm (UTC)Let me know if you do come back to Japan. I'll be here for about another year and a half and I'd be glad to show you around Kansai. Unfortunately I was doing training everyday when you were here, so I couldn't get any days off :(
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Date: 2008-10-19 05:22 pm (UTC)Anytime I'll be back in Japan I'll be sure to let you know! Hopefully by then you'll know lots of good places to go! :)
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Date: 2008-10-18 10:14 am (UTC)Lily didn times together olph dreaded others flew her free ecstasy.
Date: 2011-01-04 07:21 am (UTC)