New Years Day

This post is going to be short, but sweet. Well, short at least. New Years Day was one of recovery, we only ventured out to visit one sight while Kelsey stayed in and watched Back to the Future.

We figure since we were in Japan, why not do what the Japanese do? There's some kind of popular phrase about Rome like that. We went to check out the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa and found out that this really is what all the Japanese are doing.

The area we visited is called Asakusa, a pretty cool name which also ends in USA. It is home to a large Japanese brewery called Asahi. I found out later that this picture I had taken is of the Asahi headquarters, where the building on the left (slightly obstructed) is made to look like a mug of frosty ale. There's also a giant yellow blob.

So we made it to the area of the temple and it turned out a few hundred thousand people also wanted to visit that day.

The direct line for the temple was super long. Like three blocks down the row of souvenier shops and then another block or two. PACKED. We snuck down a side alleyway to try to get a peek and found sort of a shortcut to the temple. We got lucky and the traffic controllers let people from the sides in across the main route to go to the shops. We went in there, ducked inside of a shop, and joined the main route. We weren't going inside the temple anyway, so it wasn't that bad of a thing to do. This is a view of the shop alley:

This is one of the impressive temple buildings, but I don't think it's the main one. How's that for informative?

A dog we met along the way:

This was one of my favorites, this 5 story pagoda. Impressive:

We walked up near the temple, then went off to the side because we weren't sure what we would do once inside the temple. It was nice that all along the sides were stands with great Japanese food. By great Japanese food I mean all of the chocolate bananas you could ever want.

Here's one of the non-chocolate banana food stands:

This is a coy pond that I enjoyed:

Well, like I said, this one post is nice and short. I expect the one tomorrow to be more exciting since we went to Tokyo National Museum and the Edo Tokyo Museum. I took about 200 pictures that day so check back tomorrow.

Signs: They're Big in Japan

As anyone who has read this blog knows, I really like (am borderline obsessed with) cute cartoon characters and mascots on signs. The trip to Japan presented the opportunity to see another wacky Asian culture's take on how signs should be made. In Japan's case, they aren't nearly as heavy on the cutesy mascot type sign. That's a slight bummer, but they more than made up for it in all out zaniness.

The way I see it in my experience, there are three primary reasons that a Japanese sign is funny to me. Type 1: the designers designed it to be funny, and pulled it off. Type 2: the designers are going for something I completely don't understand and find hilarious. Type 3: sometimes my favorite, the Japanese word sounds like something in English. In the end, I think the reason number two definitely comes up the most.

I have in this post 15 of my favorite signs I saw in Japan, so hit the play button for some background music and enjoy:

This one is a totally common street sign. I think it's for a crosswalk or something about the sidewalk but the picture is just not clear at all to me.

This one was a HUGE sign in the electric district of some weird old dude.

This is actually a type 1, they want to discourage people from drinking and passing out in the subways. We could use signs like this in Korea, everywhere.

This sign was in the gondola near Mount Fuji, just oddly worded with a typo. I missed getting a picture of a guy holding this sign at a gondola stop that said 'The passenger who wishes to get off will raise my hand.'

This is on a toy vending machine, the character looks a little like a poo.

Something about not smoking....

Hey, it's another Type 1 spotting, from the famed Condomania.

I have no idea what this sign is going for, but I don't want my karaoke to leave me angry and nose deep in some water.

Just a sign I liked, maybe a restaurant?

Just Tommy Lee Jones tryin' to sell me some coffee.

This is an awesome sign that was down in a subway stop. The world needs more signs like this.

This was actually posted to warn about officers stationed to control traffic. I don't know if I would like being compared to an Alfalfa mouse.

If you're riding the crazy train, remember your point card.

Type 3!!!! But, it reminds me of the number 2.

Just a cute food court sign.

Anyway, thats it for today, I thought I would take a break from the day to day recaps and switch it up a little. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about New Years Day in Japan.

A Japanese New Years Eve

Here we were, New Years Eve, in Tokyo, Japan. Most guidebooks and Japanese tourism experts recommend to travel to Japan pretty much anytime EXCEPT New Years. The reason for this is that New Years in Japan is like Christmas in the States. Everybody is traveling and visiting family, and nothing is open. So yeah, this was the worst time to go to Japan, but it was our only option.

Our New Years Eve started with a trip to Harajuku. This is a place known for trendy clothes shopping and teens that dress in a completely outlandish mismatched style. This is what we were looking for, some of these Harajuku girls, but they didn't seem to come out at all on New Years Eve. There were, however a lot of food stands and a lot of people due to the holiday:

We all treated ourselves to some chocolate bananas, here's Amber and Kelsey obtaining bananas in the background of my delicious white chocolate banana:

There were some really nice side streets with shops and art studios in Harajuku. It was nice to escape the mob of people for a while. Here's Amber, Dave, and Kelsey undernearth a Harajuku archway:

There were some pretty strange, random sightings in Harajuku, including this store display:

For whatever reason there is a store called Condomania in Harajuku:

My dad had to go home due to an oncoming cold, which gave the fish lovers in our family a chance to get some sushi. There was a great conveyor belt sushi shop in Harajuku which was one of the highlights. This restaurant is set up like a bar, except the bar is next to a conveyor belt which brings delicious sushi. I'll talk more about this in an upcoming post devoted to food in Japan.

Harajuku also has a primary shopping street. As you can see, it was really, really ridiculous, so we didn't end up going into any shops. They were all open, though, so it was nice to know that we could have gone. This place which houses an oriental bazaar was closed the entire New Year Holiday, so I think I missed out on some prime souvenier opportunities.

The day was finished in Harajuku and we went back to rest before a New Years Eve celebration. My parents stayed at home and celebrated by resting their feet for a night, but Amber, Dave, Kelsey, and I went out to Rippongi with our Australian friends. Rippongi is home to Tokyo Tower, this giant orange and white tower which held one of the larger celebrations that night.
We made it to the subway stop in Rippongi about ten minutes before midnight, so we didn't have a long time to stake out a good setting. We stopped in front of this large temple area that filled, so we couldn't have gotten in very easily. It left us a good view of the tower, which was nice.

There was a large countdown which we couldn't understand because it was in Japanese, and then at the stroke of midnight everybody in the temple released a white balloon with a New Years wish tied to it. It was a great sight, but didn't show up well on camera.
I did get at least one nice shot in my first photos of 2010:

So that was the end of an entire decade, the zeros or oughts or whatever. Let's hope that the tens are just as great or better. Happy New Year.

The Mount Fuji

Here we are at Japan, day 2. Since we are of course an adventurous family, we wanted to explore one of the most famous mountains in the world and a huge tourist destination, Mount Fuji. This trip didn't involve any actual climbing since they only allow that a few months out of the year. It did involve a train ride, a cable car ride, a gondola ride, a boat ride, and a bus ride.

Of course I started my Mount Fuji day off, as everyone should, by drinking fire. This fire tasted a lot like iced coffee.

We started by riding the JR to the train that would take us out to Mount Fuji. In a bit of a rush to catch the next train, we ended up boarding a train called the romance car. I don't know exactly why it's called the romance car, but the seats were really nice. When the guy came to check our tickets and found out we had cheaper ones we had to shell out a bunch more money. I did something unromantic to their bathroom toilet at least.

The train did offer some nice views of Mount Fuji along the way. I'm going to level with you, this is the best photo I was able to get due to the amount of fog that day. There's an electrical pole in the way but it's still my best.

Along the way, we stopped in a town called Odawara to view a castle. It was a charming little town with some nice New Year's decorations up.

The castle was quite impressive, it had been converted into a museum about the history of the castle and with a lot of information on Samurais. I couldn't take any photos inside, unfortunately. Here's a view of the front of the castle, though:

This is a gate they were proud of for being the biggest one in the castle. It's pretty big, I guess.

From there it was another short train ride to Owakudani, where we could ride a cable car and then a gondola up a nearby mountain for a better view of Fuji. The gondola ride was one of my favorite parts because these ropes were so long dangling us over the valley.

And, in case you are wondering, this gondola does hold the Guiness world record for busiest gondola lift. It may also hold the record for smells most like eggs also, but they didn't have a sign about that.

The egg smell was because there is a lot of sulfur in this valley and a lot of sulfur mines, as seen below:

So we got to the next stop near these sulfur mines where they offer a small nature hike. We didn't feel up to it because it was ridiculously windy. So, we rode the gondala down the next leg to form of transportation number 4, this pirate looking ship. We were on one of the lower floors, and we couldn't see much from the boat. Luckily, Kelsey and I were sitting next to this little girl who challenged us to a face making competition, so we were entertained. I'm pretty sure Kelsey and I won.
The boat took us across Lake Ashi where we rode a bus, form of transportation number 5. The bus took us to another train station, another one of my highlights of the day. I liked this train because it operated in both directions, but only had one track. The way this worked was that the trains from both directions had to stop at a station at the same time because the track separated for only a little bit at the station.
Well, that was about the end of the day. We went out to eat and made it back to the hotel and were pretty pooped. We had to rest up for the next day, which you will be able to read about tomorrow.

P.S. go Packers!

Japan: The First Full Day

All right now, Japan, first full day. What do we do? How about......a huge department store?How about......a palace? How about....electronics? All right, let's do all of these things. Here are some nice photos of our first full day.

We hiked over to Japan Rail (JR from now on) and headed to Ginza which has these pretty crazy huge and crazy expensive department stores. My family checked out this 8 story department store called Matsuya Ginza. Actually it's 8 stories with a roof garden. I didn't take any photos of the store because I'm always nervous about being suspected as a burglar when I take photos in a department store. Matsuya Ginza had a nice food court in the basement, and plenty of stores through all of the floors, but the best part was near the top where they had selections of Japanese prints and old books. I ended up picking up one print without any real information on it but I'm assuming it's not too rare or valuable because it cost me only 500 yen (roughly $6).

Here's a photo of the area:

From the store it was a quick walk over to the grounds of the Imperial Palace, aka where the Emporer of Japan lives. This next pic is a giant moat that surrounds the grounds:

It was a nice day and a few swans were out. This guy was a beast because he was about five times the size of the ducks in the moat:
Here are Amber and Dave in a candid shot in front of the Statue of Kusunoke. According to Dave, he was the ideal of samurai loyalty.
This is a picturesque view of the imperial residence. I would say I'm proud of the photo but I don't think you could take a bad picture from there:
We walked over to a park with these nice fountains in it. It was a great little park because it was somewhat removed from the big city, yet there were still the giant buildings to enjoy as a backdrop.
I sniped a photo of Amber and Kelsey over Dave's shoulder:
Next we were off to a gargantuan electronics disctrict, Akihabara "Electric Town". This district was basically one huge electronics store after another, which is OK but about a million other people wanted to see it at the same time:
Here's a photo of my mom, probably trying to figure out what some crazy sign says:
The street was also littered with these girls who dressed up costumes like little amine characters and shouted things and tried to hand you paper as you passed by. There were literally dozens of girls doing it that day. I caught this before she noticed me so she wasn't smiling or anything. These girls are getting paid, so obviously they should be smiling constantly!
I did pick up one souvenier from this day. Kelsey and I stopped into this store that sold ridiculously expensive collectible action figures, and they had a bin outside of these plastic bags full of junk. It turned out the junk was discarded happy meal style toys, and you could buy it for only 200 yen. I'll have a picture of it in my post where I show all of my souveniers.

We capped that day off with some delicious Indian food, and I got the amazing mutton curry. Kelsey and I went out later with some Australians we met from across the hall in our hotel. We went out for a few beers and sake and made some new friends. Another great day. Come back tomorrow for a post about Mount Fuji.