Both of these days were sort of travel days so I have less content, and I decided to combine them into one post.
4/21: Last day in Malaysia
My flight out of Malaysia was at 12:10 AM, so I needed to leave for the airport around 8PM (an hour of travel to the airport + 3 hours to get through it). I also needed a solid nap before since I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the last few days, and it would be a 7-hour flight. So my plan for the day:
- Get breakfast
- Spend my remaining Malaysian cash at a local street market and take more photos
- Nap
- Go to the airport
After breakfast (which I forgot to take a photo of, but it was the same thing I got for dinner my first night in Malaysia), I started heading to the markets. However, when I pulled my camera out to take a photo, I realized it was dead. I’d forgotten to charge my spare batteries, so I instead walked to a nearby shop for some batteries. When I put them in, the camera . . . wouldn’t extend the lens!
I paid $5 for this camera at Goodwill in July last year, and despite it being grimy, after some cleanup it worked great. It’s since become one of my favorite cameras, being covered in manual controls, with a flip-out screen, and enough resolution to take pretty decent photos for web use (5MP). Later in the summer, I was using it on the beach and it got splashed in a sandy wave as I was trying to take a closeup photo of waves (my fault). It stopped working for a bit after that, but then started working again! The lens made a grinding noise each time I would open it, but it kept working! So I brought it on this trip, having used it for hundreds of photos since then.
Sadly, it finally seems to have given up the ghost 😦
Oh well, for $5 and probably over a thousand photos, I can’t complain! A replacement of the same model will cost around $30 if I find a nice example on eBay.
Of course, I have my phone for photos – but I really prefer a camera with a proper lens, even if it’s from 2003. So now my plan was:
Get breakfastSpend my remaining Malaysian cash at a local street market and take more photosGo find a used camera for less than $50- Nap
- Go to the airport
So, I spent the next hour and a half walking sweatily from camera store to camera store, hoping to find something of around the same era for about $50…
And didn’t find anything! The camera stores either only sold new cameras, only had film cameras, or had a small selection of too-new, too-expensive cameras.
Luckily, the next place I was headed was Tokyo – the perfect place to find a deal on an older digital camera, so I held out for a day and just used my phone.
Of course, I found more interesting vehicles – a nice example of one of the more popular moped models, a neat van, and a small (for the US) delivery truck painted to look like The Incredible Hulk.
As I walked, I also took more photos of the streets – in this area, bustling with shops and market activity.
Then, I went back for my nap. Malaysia was really cool, and I knew Japan would be too, but being sleep deprived (and less excited about how expensive Japan would be), I was having a hard time looking forward to the next leg of my trip – I would really have rather gone home.
Traveling has been really fun, and I’m glad I’m here, but it’s been hard, too. I really like having a place I’m completely comfortable in to retreat to when I need a break, and obviously when you’re traveling (and mostly in shared dorm rooms), that’s not very possible. Add that to changing cities and countries every few days, a new language that you don’t know, new cultures you have to think about, and having to figure out where to eat for every single meal every single day, and it gets pretty exhausting.
(As I’m writing this, I feel better – I still wish I could go home sooner, but that would be prohibitively expensive, and I recognize a lot of my feeling like this comes from having been behind on sleep. I’ll be at this hostel for 6 days, I just slept for 16 hours, and there are grocery stores nearby at which to get food for breakfast and any other meal I don’t want to go to a restaurant for – I’ll probably take the next few days a little easier, then feel more ready to explore Japan.)
Anyway! Post nap, I packed and headed back to the airport.
The tower near my hostel had lights along the sides that I hadn’t realized were there during the day! The street market was busier than ever, and I think I didn’t really see as much as Malaysia had to offer – I will have to come back sometime for a more dedicated trip.
On my way out, I grabbed a couple of “thousand layer patties” (little warm pastries which have chicken or beef stuffed in them) from a street shop for dinner. At the airport, I ate these alongside a Dunkin Donuts iced latte before boarding.
This plane was much more like a normal American flight, without screens, free food, or fancy seats. It did have more legroom than normal, though! I slept for most of the flight.
4/22: Camera hunting in Toyko!
The next morning around 8:30AM local time, I landed at Narita International Airport, about 65km from Toyko. Here, I charged my phone, got some cash (cards are less commonly accepted in Japan, apparently), and ate some breakfast at the airport before buying a train ticket into Toyko.
Check-in time at the hostel wasn’t till 5PM, so I headed first to Shinjuku Station, around which there are a lot of camera stores with both new and used gear.
The first few stores I stopped at I felt too poor to walk into – lots of expensive cameras (the cheapest were around $500 USD), pretty but far outside my budget (and not what I wanted, anyway). However, the third one I walked into had an “as-is” shelf, and on that shelf, an Olympus C4100! After testing it, I paid 3500 Yen ($24.50 USD) for the camera and two memory cards (it takes a different kind than my current one does).
Glad to have found a replacement camera, I headed back out and took a few photos. It was a rainy grey day (much like Oregon!) and it made the streets wet and the bright signs pop against the grey buildings and skies.
I’m pretty happy with this camera! Straight out of the camera the images have a lot of color, though I can tell the dynamic range is worse (I had to do more minor adjustments to these images in order to bring the bright areas down and the dark areas up than I normally would do for the other camera).
There were a few more camera shops to stop by, so of course I did. What, just because I found a camera doesn’t mean I won’t look at more!
I forgot to take pictures of the last camera store I went to, but it would have been a perfect place if I hadn’t already found a good camera. It was a small shop, crammed floor to ceiling with antique to (somewhat) modern cameras, mostly film, but with a good mix of digital in there too. There were a lot of cameras sold non-working, most for only a couple thousand yen ($10-30 USD). Of course they had working cameras too, also for what seemed to be good prices (under 20,000 yen in a lot of cases, or USD $140). I may have bought two parts cameras of the same model, in the hopes of combining them into one working camera… They were only $30 together!
These are half-frame cameras, meaning they shoot two photos per one film frame (by using only half of the frame each time). This effectively halves the resolution of the photo which does decrease the quality, but means you can get either 48 or 74 shots depending on what type of film you use! With the cost of film, this is definitely a benefit.
They’re from around 1963 (62 years old!) and neither one works – the shutter doesn’t seem to properly close. I suspect (after watching a video on YouTube) that the shutter blades just need to be cleaned, but I’m not completely sure yet.
(To Felix and Katerina: I don’t think I’ll get the chance to rent a moped 😦 I believe the laws are a lot more restrictive in Japan, and in Italy and Malaysia it didn’t seem safe to do so. Someday I will go back to Barcelona, and I’ll be sure to rent one there! Instead, your moped money will go towards some nice sushi!)
All for now! Let’s hope my spare luggage space survives the next few days – no more camera shops!
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