Politeness - Everyone here is so polite, like really polite. Even in Italy, with Anya's italian speaking ability, there were a couple times when you felt that you were an annoyance for asking information from information tasked people. Everyone greets you with a cheer, and you feel as if you can't do much wrong, even without knowing the language. We even had a person come up to us when we were looking at a map and offer to help us out of the blue. (Which we really didn't need at the time, but still nice. Especially with this wacky Ward, block number naming system for addresses. OMG. We'll address that later.)
Rush hour on the Ginza line - We've heard about the rush hour packing of people onto the subway, but now we've actually experienced it. So we've done Termini in Rome. Had to smash our bodies into Moscow trains. What sets Tokyo apart is that people do it, but in a semi-organized manner. Instead of a panicked mess, the police organize people, and check to make sure everyone is in. People actually form up into lines for each door. Once its your turn, you do push, and push fairly hard to get everyone in. Once your in, packed like sardines, it gets really quiet. Not a peep.
Tall Japanese - They've grown in the past twenty years since I was here. Most of the people are shorter than Anya and I, but many people are the same height and even taller... which blew me away. Boys and girls. Lots of tall girls wearing tall heals. So I guess they're finally getting that protein diet.
Smoking - I assumed there would be a lot of smokers, but not as much as I remember. Especially not as many as Paris or Seoul. There was only one restaurant in which someone was smoking and we saw only two other places where smokers clustered together outside train stations.
Street Addresses - Oh my lord, the single biggest pain in the butt for finding things in Tokyo is the lack of street names, street addresses and decent maps... and crappy travel guide maps and instructions. Case in point - Asakusa Manos. So its in our Lonely Planet travel book, listed as a Russian style restaurant in Tokyo. We thought it would be fun to see Russian food interpreted in Japan and we were "nearby." But the street listed in the address is not the street you'll find it on. The street listed borders the ward (mini-neighborhood) in which it is in. An area might have several wards. Each ward then might have about twenty blocks. And then each block might have several buildings or fronts. There really is no order to the block numbering. If your lucky, there will be a neighborhood map with each block number listed out. And to make even more fun, its easy to loose track of how many streets you've past when trying to locate a block because insanely small streets, barely an alley, qualify as a street, thus a new "block." Some blocks are barely 20 feet wide and maybe fit 3 buildings. Anyways - it took us forever to find the place. Luckily we located a neighborhood map. But the kicker - the address was 2-7-14. We assume Ward #2, Block 7, Entrance 14. But no, after going in circles we went to block 14 and found Manos, Entrance 10... So the address was totally wrong. It should have been 2-14-10. And to top it off, the hours were wrong in the book. It was closed. Thanks Lonely Planet!! Wankers.
Fashion - Well Anya was really impressed with how made up women in Rome were. In Paris, even more so by a huge leap. Tokyo is another jump past Paris. Especially in Ginza, the shopping is crazy. Huge buildings for places like Cartier, De Beers and other jewelry and fashion designers.
Food servings - How are these people all not overweight? My god, each bowl of noodles I eat just hits me like a brick. Its all good and stuff, but wow - its not like they serve tiny portions here. Starving has not been a problem.
The Rundown:
So we're exhausted. We started the day by taking the subway through the heart of rush hour to get to Asakusa's temple and neighborhood. We walked around a bit. They have what seems a cherry blossom festival, even though they haven't bloomed yet. But it was fun to see the area and all the people. We had a good solid lunch before diving back into the subway for Ginza and the shopping district. The food court in the shopping center we came to first was awesome - we have to go back there. We were still full. We roamed Ginza for a while and then trekked over to the Hama Rikyu-Onshi-teien, a park that use to be the sport hunting park for the Shogun it seems. It was a nice place but under construction all over the place - they were preparing to drain many of the lakes, so not the placid zen experience. We crawled around the new sky-walkways surrounding the Shiodome and tried to find something to eat, but alas nothing caught our fancy. So we headed back to a dessert bar back in Ginza and called it a day.
We wanted to take a nap and head back out that night, but we were dog tired.
Next on the plate should be heading over to the fish market first thing this morning, and then hopefully taking a day trip to Nikko.
Cheers.
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| Japan - Day01 |
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