jacobblogs

Tag: Solo travel

  • Tokyo, Japan: 5/4, 5/5

    These two days have also been pretty relaxed. Despite having two weeks here, I’m realizing that I’ve spent a lot of days relaxing. Tomorrow, I plan to take a trip to Mount Nokogiri, which will take the entire day, so saving up on energy isn’t a terrible idea.

    5/4: Just hanging around

    Today, the plan was to go to a cat cafe with one of the other people at the guest house, and then go to an Onsen (a traditional Japanese public bath). However, first I spent some time blogging, and then once we finally left and got to the cat cafe, it was full for the day. So instead, we headed to a sweets shop, and I bought more candy than I’ve gotten in years (my favorite was the strawberry flavored KitKats). After this, we headed to a park and chatted for a while while snacking on the sweets.

    On the way back, we took a route along a little footpath winding through the residential buildings and I took a number of photos.

    The text on this sign translates to “Crime Prevention Promotion District” (top left is “Adachi Ward” and top right is “Metropolitan Police Department”)

    5/5: The plans for 5/4!

    Today’s first task was to figure out what I’m doing for the next few days. I have one free day left – tomorrow, and then Wednesday will be a travel day completely.

    Tomorrow my plan is to take a day trip to Mount Nokogiri (as I think I mentioned at the beginning of this post) – so I packed my bags and planned the route. We will see if I have the energy for 6 hours of train rides tomorrow – or if I stay home.

    However, once I was done with my productive tasks in the morning, I finally headed out to the cat cafe, and this time they had space for us!

    Checking in to the cat cafe was a small process – first, we removed our shoes and put them on a rack (most places in Japan are shoes-off inside, aside from stores). Then, we washed our hands, and went through a small gate. The lady running the cafe gave us slippers to wear, and led us up to a table before taking our coffee orders. Almost immediately, a large orange car sauntered over and flopped down on top of the menu (which we were fine with, of course).

    All around the small room, there were about 8 cats lounging around, mostly napping. The room was quiet and had some soft jazz playing, and there were a few other people around petting the cats. I was quite sleepy (but so were the cats), but it was nice to sit and pet them (or watch them sleep) as we sipped our drinks.

    After an hour at the cat cafe (which cost 1200 yen, about $8.40), we left and headed back to the guesthouse. On the way, I grabbed another vending machine drink (a pineapple soda?) and a green grape flavored popsicle I’d had a few days ago and was craving.

    I also keep seeing these green public payphones – and am tempted to make a call on them, but have nobody to call and no reason to…

    After all this, I headed (finally!) to the Onsen. Japanese Onsen are essentially public baths (IE, you are in male or female rooms with public baths). You walk into the bath room, put your clothes in lockers, rinse off, and then sit in hot-spring water that’s close to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) or cold water that’s closer to 18 Celsius (54 Fahrenheit). You can alternate between these two, or just do one (most people do the hot water, not the cold water). There was also a sauna, but that cost extra.

    I stayed in the baths for about 30 minutes (I would have gone longer, but had plans this evening to make), but they were very relaxing.

    When I first got in, I accidentally got into the electric shock bath (it had nobody already in it, and being shy I went for the bath that was empty – oops!) It’s apparently supposed to exercise your muscles and help you lose weight, by sending small electric currents through the bath (and you) which make your muscles twitch. It certainly made my muscles twitch! I didn’t stay in long enough to notice weight loss effects, though ;P

    An older Japanese man in the (non-electric) bath next to me asked (probably after seeing my face upon realizing I was in the electric bath) if I was ok – to which I replied yes, and he said, pointing knowingly at the bath, “electric!”

    He then asked me where I was from (“USA”), where I was staying in Japan (“Tokyo, at Makoto Guesthouse”) and (after a few failed attempts of me not understanding what he was asking) what my impression of Japan was. I told him I liked it very much. He asked how old I was (“Twenty-four”, though I don’t know if he understood what I meant), then wished me a nice day before climbing out of the bath and going to rinse himself off.

    I would go back to the Onsen if I had time – afterwards, I felt very relaxed and calmed.

    The rest of the evening has been spent in the common area of the guesthouse writing this post and eating dinner. Tomorrow, if I’m feeling up for it, I will head to Mount Nokogiri!

    All for now!

  • Tokyo, Japan: 5/3

    The day before, I and a couple of others decided we wanted to get up early to head to a flea market. It was an hour away, and started at 9AM – so we planned to leave by 8AM, and I woke up at 7AM (which in retrospect isn’t that early, but for my sleep schedule here, it was).

    We managed to stick together on the train, but once we got to the flea market we mostly split up. Inspired by my Gameboy find the day before, a couple of guys went off to look for Gameboys. Micro (a German guy staying in the guest house) wanted to find a Gameboy Advance SP (the kind that looks like a little square and flips up) – and managed to find a Gameboy Advance (not SP) with Pokemon Ruby inside, all for 5000 yen (about $35 USD). After some fiddling with the power switch it worked! And now I want a Gameboy Advance . . . 😅

    We spent about 5 hours at the flea market, and I got a few things:

    • A vintage mechanical watch with an auto-winding feature, which cost 5000 yen ($35 USD), but (as it ends up) runs about 2x faster than it should – something I think can be adjusted?
    • Four Gameboy games:
      • Super Mario Land, 900 yen (in English!)
      • Dr. Mario, 500 yen (Also in English!)
      • “Hamster Club” (translated from Japanese) – as best I can tell this is a game about taking care of hamsters? I got it because it looked cute and was only 500 yen.
      • Pokemon Green (Only available in Japanese, no English version was produced) for 1700 yen.
    • A US Eisenhower $1 coin (for $2.10, which I thought was funny)
    • A couple of old Japanese coins
    • One other item that is a gift for a friend who might read this blog 😛

    After five hours of the flea market, I and another guest-house friend headed to an all-you-can-eat okonomiyaki place.

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    On the way I finally stopped at a vending machine to try it out. I don’t know why I was expecting something more dramatic than what happened – I put two 100 yen coins in, pressed the button for the tea I wanted, and it clunked out of the machine into the tray with my change.
    Japanese architecture is not made for people my height… I occasionally need to duck to get through doorways. I always need to duck on the metro exiting or entering the train, and a few days back, I was in a shop where I needed to hunch over most of the time!
    Okonomiyaki is done a few different ways, but here it comes in a bowl, a mix of greens, meat (optionally), an egg and some other ingredients. Once mixed together, you pour it out onto a hot griddle and shape it into a pancake of sorts before letting it cook for about 10 minutes on each side.
    Once finished, you drizzle them with okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise, then cut them up and eat them in little bites.

    I first had okonomiyaki with the Petersons, since they loved it when they went to Japan. I’ve never had it otherwise, so I was glad for the chance to try it in Japan!

    After this, I was very sleepy – so I went back to the guesthouse (arrived around 7:30) and slept for two hours (till around 9:30) before getting up, grabbing a few snacks at the closest convenience store (convenience stores here are actually quite convenient! They have the normal junk food seen in the US, but also a number of decently inexpensive premade food that’s pretty similar to what you’d find in a grocery store deli in the US). After spending a little time downstairs socializing, I headed to bed.

    All for today! More to come, of course. My time in Japan (and thus my time abroad) is coming to an end.

  • Mending jeans in Tokyo, Japan: 5/2

    Today was a pretty relaxed day. As I’m writing this, I can’t remember what I did most of the day, which probably means I didn’t do much.

    However, I did mend a pair of pants I’d brought! I brought only two pairs of jeans, and realized in Malaysia that they had formed holes at the upper inner corners of the back pockets!

    I’ve been wanting to learn visible mending recently (a technique for mending clothes where the mend is visible and is designed to look neat), so the day before I’d grabbed some sewing supplies at Daiso (a 100 yen store).

    I ended up deciding to use a technique where a thick thread (or sometimes yarn) is used to make a weave over the hole in the fabric. First, I had to rip up the corners of the pockets, since the holes formed right at the place where the pocket corner meets the base fabric of the pants. There was no good way to rip up the stitches, so I resorted to using a kitchen knife. It was slow, but worked!

    A finished mend on the right, the other hole on the left.

    Once done with the weave, I re-stitched the corner of the pocket back up, then began ripping up the other pocket.

    At this point, one of my guesthouse-friends wanted to go to a local cafe, so I went along, and we brought our sewing projects (they’re crocheting coasters for the guest house) and drank lattes (mine a hazelnut latte, theirs a creme brulee latte) while we worked.

    Somehow, the second weave turned out worse than the first (I struggled quite a bit with the first couple rows – I was pulling the needle through a loop the wrong way which resulted in a less defined weave pattern and was messing me up).

    Still, I’m pretty happy with the results! I may try something more adventurous for the future mends, since these are really just woven patches of another color. Some people weave flower designs, or go for full-blown embroidery. I didn’t have the confidence for that this time, maybe next time!

    The coffee shop also had these cute little ceramic animal pins. I really liked the hedgehog one!

    As it turns out, these jeans will need more mending soon – there’s a hole quickly forming in the crotch area, and smaller holes beginning to form in the other two pocket corners, with signs of imminent holes at the belt loops… Oh well – at least I know how to do it now!

    And yep, that’s basically all I did! I think I also took a nap somewhere in there …

  • Tokyo, Japan: 5/1

    Today I did a lot!

    I woke up early for my interview (for real this time), which went well!

    Then I headed back to the guesthouse to drop my luggage off after checking out of the hotel. I wasn’t allowed to hang out at the guesthouse till after 5PM, so I headed back out to Akihabara, the “Electric City” district. I’d already been, but I wanted to do more exploring, and potentially buy a piece of retro technology for myself.

    On the way to the subway station, I saw two little dogs sitting out in the sun in front of a shop. Seeing me grin and stop to take out my phone for a photo, the Japanese lady who ran the shop waved me over, so I stooped to pet them.

    They were so soft!
    The subway was actually quite empty at this time of day! Normally there are so many people around that I don’t feel comfortable taking photos.
    There are a lot of really cool old neon signs in Akihabara, which I imagine would look awesome at night.

    After getting to Akihabara, I explored another set of electronics department stores I hadn’t gone into yet.

    I did find a shop with a bunch of older digital and analog cameras, and was very tempted to get some – but most weren’t that interesting (or were overpriced).

    I did find the same model as the camera I’d originally brought that stopped working (momentarily)! But it was like $65, which is far more than I want to pay.

    It is in muuuch nicer condition than mine is though…
    Of course, there were Nintendo consoles also.

    I didn’t end up buying anything – it turns out some of the shops I was thinking of buying from were closed (It’s Golden Week here in Japan – the longest vacation most Japanese people get, so a lot of places are closed while the owners take vacation). That was better anyway – I wasn’t super excited about anything I saw, and I’m headed to a flea market on Saturday, so need some spending cash for that.

    Next I headed to Ueno Park, a large park in the middle of the Ueno district in Tokyo. In the middle of the park is an old Buddhist temple, but it’s surrounded by ponds and other greenery.

    DUCK BOATS! I told myself that if they were less than 1000 yen, I’d get one…

    The duck boats were 800 yen (for a swan one), 700 yen for a basic covered boat, and 500 for a rowboat, all for 30 minutes. So I got a covered boat!

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    My legs did not fit in the boat well, but I managed regardless to make a decent loop around the lake. It was fun, though would have been a little easier with another person (and shorter legs).

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    After this, I walked over to the Buddhist temple, and explored around it a bit.

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    After this, I headed across another bridge across the pond and stumbled upon a small flea market. And I found a lot of cool things!

    • An Original Gameboy for 800 yen (About $5.60)
    • A Gameboy camera for 500 yen ($3.50)
    • A Japanese Yoshi game for 500 yen (Still $3.50)
    • A cute ceramic cup for Mo for 300 yen ($2.10)
    • A pair of vintage sunglasses that I’m hoping don’t make me look too much like a serial killer for 2000 yen ($14)
    • A brass whistle with a Nissan label on it (gonna carry it on my keychain to get people’s attention if needed – another guy tested it for 500 yen (STILL $3.50!)
    I’d forgotten how difficult the Gameboy’s screen is to see, let alone photograph. Anyway, trust that the photos from the Gameboy camera look a little better in real life. Only a little.
    Unfortunately, immediately after getting the Gameboy to turn on and boot the Yoshi game I had to relinquish control to Izara, one of the other guesthouse guests, who has become very invested in the game. The sound doesn’t work, but if you plug in a pair of headphones it does.

    On my way back to the subway station, I snapped a few more photos in the sunset glow.

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    I tried drawing this flower later in the evening. There is a reason I have not posted the drawing.
    A majestic tree and gate
    An older metro car that was sitting in the neighborhood I walked through.
    This kindly-looking old man was taking a smoke break when I walked by. The streetcar above was behind him and I tried to sneak a photo of him, but it looks like he noticed (and didn’t mind)
    Little planters of flowers outside people’s houses are really common here, which is really cute!
    A lot of Honda Supercub mopeds around! I’m pretty sure driving a Moped would be illegal for me here, but I also haven’t seen any places to rent them.

    After this, I hung out in the common area and shared my finds with the other guests. I also got sushi at a conveyor belt place down the road, but forgot to take photos.

    All for today!

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/29

    Today was a nice day! First up, I met up with Joyce Peterson for brunch.

    I had an acai bowl. For Japan, this was pretty expensive – almost $10!

    After this, we walked around Yoyogi Park, which is a large park with lots of picnic space. Next to the park is a forest with a large Buddhist temple in the middle and multiple large Japanese gates. It’s a big tourist attraction, so we started exploring, then when Joyce had to make another appointment, I kept exploring. It was really nice to see her!

    Within the forest there was a botanical garden which cost (only 500 yen!) to enter. Lots of flowers, ponds, and even some bonsai!

    One of the entrances to the gardens.

    (I do wonder how old these are… Some bonsai take years to perfect, and still require maintenance. These looked quite impressive!)

    This one wasn’t part of the gardens officially – it was growing along the path.

    There was an ancient well (spring) inside the park too that was less impressive than it was made out to be – just a little circular pond of water flowing into a creek that fed one of the ponds in the park. Before I could see the well, I had to wait in a line of people for about 5 minutes 😛

    Outside in the forest there were a number of (attractions? things? monuments?) including this one with a ton of large paper lanterns.

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    Outside the park was an area of food vendors and a young Japanese guy beatboxing – I didn’t get a picture of him, but the sounds he was making were actually quite impressive.

    I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like this guy was smiling towards me as I took the photo.
    This little weird electric car was next to a restaurant outside the park. It’s a single-seater, probably for doing food delivery.
    This little blue Kei car was cute.
    Mariokart? O.O
    I forget the Olympics are this old!

    After the park and exploration, I stopped at an “American Burger” place to see whether it lived up to the name.

    I got a chicken based sandwich, and it was actually one of the best chicken sandwiches I’ve had, probably top three. It doesn’t look it, but with the jalepenos and fried chicken, it was delicious. (Maybe I was pretty hungry too…)

    I was pretty tired of walking around (and just tired too – still catching up on sleep), so I went to my hotel (not the guesthouse – I had only booked for 6 nights, and when I went to extend my stay, the 29th and 30th were booked – so I got a different hotel for those two nights and booked the guesthouse again from the 1st through the 7th).

    It was a private bed, but unfortunately it was also a very basic room, the bed squeaked each time I moved a centimeter, and the only light in the room made me feel like a lab rat. But, it was a place to sleep!

    All for today! This post was kind of low effort, but honestly so was half of this day, so…

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/27 (and 4/28?)

    Oh, what a day! Today didn’t start till it nearly ended – I spent most of the day just relaxing at the guesthouse (which was somewhat forced – my wallet had been misplaced the day before, and it wasn’t found until it was a little late to head to the flea market I had originally planned to go to.)

    So instead, I blogged, chatted with folks at the hostel, and relaxed.

    But!

    In the evening, a large group of us (18 people) left the hostel to go to a Korean Barbecue place with all-you-can drink lemon sours.

    The Korean barbecue place
    Korean barbecue is mostly meat – brought raw to the table, and cooked over a small gas grill to your preferred level.
    One of the meats I had was a beef tongue with lemon slices, and then some seasoned guts.
    This was vanilla ice cream with a pomegranate syrup? It was almost a vinaigrette.
    One of the other people from the guesthouse wanted to try my camera!

    After the barbecue, we ran across someone with a guitar jamming out next to the train station. Several people ended up dancing while the rest of us watched in a circle, and at the end we clapped and left him a few tips. (Sadly, I did not get a photo of this!)

    Then, we navigated all 18 of us back to the guesthouse through two train stops. For some reason, the Korean Barbecue place only gave us one check, not split by tables (for about $400 USD) – so we spent the next hour and a half trying to decipher the Japanese receipt and figuring out who needed to pay how much. After much ado, we ended up just splitting everything evenly (except for the people who didn’t have a lot). The guy who paid was also american, so I acted as a bank and took some of the cash and sent him money via Venmo. Now I have spending cash for the rest of the trip!

    On the way back we had ran across a couple of Japanese locals who’d just left a bar, and they convinced a number of our group to join them for karaoke after the payment sorting out had happened.

    I did not go back out, but instead stayed back and kept chatting with one of the other guests. We lost track of time as we chatted, until the other group came back from Karaoke . . . At 4:30 AM 😅

    Then of course, we had to chat with the folks who’d come back for a while, and then by the end of that, the sun had begun to rise. At that point, it looked nice outside, and we were already not going to get good sleep – so we just headed out to the quiet morning streets, grabbed a coffee at 7-11, and meandered around the quiet neighborhood as the sun rose.

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    We watched this cat for a while, it watched us.
    The weathered paint here looked cool. This photo somehow almost looks like a miniature scene to me.
    I was told that the common use of tiles has to do with earthquake resistance?
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    Finally at around 10AM, I ended up heading to bed – and now after 8 hours of sleeping (I woke up at 6PM), I’m here chilling and writing this post. I’ll (in theory) go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour! I have to, because I check out of this guesthouse tomorrow at 10 AM. I’ll be back to this same guesthouse in a few days – I wanted to extend my stay for the rest of the trip, but the next two days are booked out – so I’ll be staying in another guesthouse for two nights before coming back for the rest of my trip.

    All for now! 🙂

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/26

    Most days in Japan so far I’ve started the day with nothing planned, and then ended up busy anyway. Usually someone else in the hostel is going out to do something in the city and I tag along. Today, Matt wanted to go get curry at a Japanese curry place he’d heard about, and I wanted to go check out a flea market some of the other guests had told me about. So we headed out via the trains!

    Almost all the train stations here have these barriers that automatically open when the train doors open, rather than an open gap next to the tracks.

    The neighborhood where the curry place was is really cute – it’s only a small distance from the tourist center of Tokyo, but was surprisingly uncrowded.

    Matt told me that many old houses here the signs are the name of the house – usually named after the family name of the people who live there.
    These are the largest pitcher plants I’ve seen!
    Elliot, I know you’ll like this one 🙂
    I love the colors here.

    As it turns out, the curry place had a long line, and unless we’d had a reservation, we would have had to wait for almost two hours. We gave up and decided to get tacos at a shop we’d passed earlier.

    The tacos were pretty good! I always think it’s funny seeing food from a cuisine more local to where I live in foreign countries – it’s interesting to see what’s authentic, and what has been influenced by the country it’s being prepared in.

    In this case, the tacos were relatively accurate! I like the tacos back home much more, but that’s not a big surprise. I imagine it’s hard to get ingredients as authentic here.

    A classic bike from the 80’s. I think it is a Honda Trail 110.

    After the tacos, we decided we were too late for the flea market (it closed at 2:30 PM), so we instead headed into the tourist center to do some vintage clothes shopping. I found a couple of cute shirts (I regretted not bringing more comfortable t-shirts), and some other neat trinkets I was wanted (but resisted the urge) to purchase.

    I particularly liked the watch in the middle with the black face, but it was about $31 USD, a little more than I’ve paid for most of my watches.

    We did run across a souvenir store, outside of which there were dozens of Gashapon vending machines (for a few hundred yen, they dispense little toys). I saw one for miniature camera models, so of course I got one.

    The rest of the day was pretty relaxed. I came back the hostel and did laundry (and in the process, lost my wallet, which I didn’t find until this morning! It had somehow ended up in someone else’s pocket when I was exchanging coins with him for the laundry machine).

    We again stayed up quite late chatting about various things (this time, about whether or not everything has a taste (does a ceramic mug have a taste?) and what even makes up taste in the first place.

    The lady who plays an Erhu came back in, and a few people hadn’t seen one before, so she gave us another concert, which I this time managed to record a moment of:

    All for today!

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/25

    Granola, yogurt, banannas, and orange juice.

    Finally a breakfast picture! I had the presence of mind to take a photo before I started eating.

    After breakfast and some blogging, I headed out with Matt, one of the other people at the hostel – we were heading in the same direction towards Toyko, he to get a haircut and I to visit Akihabara, Toyko’s “Electric City” – known for (among other things), a lot of electronics shops. Perfect for me!

    First though, I needed a Suica card – the trains in Toyko (and I believe, much of Japan) are paid for via “IC Cards”. You can technically buy individual tickets, but the system isn’t well set up for them. I know this because on my way from the camera shops to the hostel, after about 25 minutes of careful studying of multiple guides on her PDF and consulting another coworker, the lady at the ticket counter finally printed one out, and then hand wrote kanji on it, added an official stamp, and sent me on my way.

    None of the ticket machines would take the modified ticket, so each station I had to go to the information booth to ask to be let through.

    Anyway, the first thing we did was stop by an ATM (I withdrew 10,000 Yen, about USD $70 – cash is very commonly used here, and card isn’t universally accepted), then went to a ticket machine to get my very own Suica IC card, preloaded with 1,500 Yen.

    I like the little penguin. Other cards have other designs.

    After 30 or so minutes on the subway into the heart of Tokyo, I hopped off at Akihabara station and started exploring.

    It’s amazing how much they have for sale here! You can buy new and used phones, ranging from $15 for very old phones in untested condition like the ones in the bins below, to new or refurbished iPhones and other high end brands.

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    If you wanted to buy a computer, it would be easy – dozens of shops with new and used laptops and desktops, plus any accessory you could need.

    This TINY laptop was 14,000 Yen, about $90. Despite its size, it would work fine for light computing, and the fact that it would fit in my side bag is tempting…

    Better yet, if you wanted to build a computer, everything you need, new and used, is available with in a few minutes’ walk. From low-end web browsing PCs to high end gaming machines, everything is here.

    I found this vintage macbook too! After I finished looking at it, I realized the bin it had been in had a “do not touch” sticker on it (that, to be fair, had fallen off). Oops.

    There are also tons of little stands with a wide variety of little electronic components. Some of these take up only a hundred or so square feet, and are run by an older Japanese man. It surprises me (pleasantly) that it’s possible for these people to have their own little business – in a world where most electronics are now bought online, it’s really cool to see these little shops still around. I have heard that they are becoming less and less common.

    I also checked out a couple of thrift stores – the ones I went to mostly focused on electronics and musical instruments. Both stores were split across multiple levels – the nicer things on the upper levels, but in the basement, the “Junk” – less valuable, possibly non-working things for lower prices. I very much enjoyed digging through these bins.

    There were also a ton of vintage game consoles, especially Nintendo. It makes sense – Nintendo is a Japanese company, and their first consoles were originally released in Japan. The yellow/red consoles are the original Japanese version of the NES.

    Some of these are only $15-20 USD! I’m tempted to get one, but the cartridges between the Family Computer and NES aren’t compatible – though maybe a minor case modification would solve this…
    You can’t see it behind the price tag, but this camera is a pretty unique digital camera from 1998 – very early for digital cameras! However, the price ($115 USD!) is ridiculous.

    In my quest to find vintage computer gear, I visited a bunch of retro gaming shops, and found even more consoles, and thousands of games.

    There were games in bins like these, but most of the more popular games were in individual plastic packaging and hanging on pegs.
    The Super Famicon was the next generation of console after the Nintendo Family Computer, but was still pretty similar.
    Anime / Manga is a big part of the culture here too – lots of the game shops also had that sort of thing yet.
    The original “Pocket Monsters” Pokemon games.
    Two pieces of very cool tech – the robot companion for the Nintendo Family Computer, and a very old retro gaming computer with a vertical aspect ratio.
    There were also a lot of consoles I’d never heard of before, like this one, the “PC Engine”.
    Apparently there is a floppy disk drive add-on for the original Family Computer – it was used for saving games, even as an alternative for game cartridges, and apparently for additional higher quality soundtracks on games.

    Many larger stores here are broken across several floors in a narrow 5-7 story building. In the top floor of one of the vintage game stores was an arcade with a bunch of old arcade machines and a bunch of snacks for sale.

    One of these had english voice acting.
    This supersized gameboy didn’t seem to be playable. I wonder what it was supposed to do?

    After several hours of walking around I needed some food – and Matt, another person at my hostel, had joined me to explore. We found a local dry ramen shop (no broth, just oil on the noodles) and got some food there.

    It was great! Apparently it’s often had with mayonnaise, which I tried on about 1/8th of the remaining noodles – it was delicious!

    After the noodles, we did a little more looking around, but we were both kind of tired from walking around at that point, so we headed back to the hostel.

    Later in the evening, a group of several of us decided to check out a local karaoke place (apparently karaoke is HUGE in Japan) – the place just opened today, and was giving out 30% off coupons.

    I guess I forgot to smile, oops!

    After this and a few more hours of late-night chatting, I finally got to bed at 2:30 AM… 😛

    All for now!

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/24

    A blog post written on the same day as the post is about? Wild!

    I continue to forget to take pictures of my breakfasts – generally by the time I get breakfast I’m too focused on eating to remember! But, this morning I walked to a nearby grocery store to grab bananas, yogurt, granola, and orange juice. I also grabbed a few mini oranges for snacks throughout the next few days. The hostel I’m in has a kitchen, which means I can actually cook if I want! I will be taking advantage of it – being able to make my own food will be nice.

    After breakfast (and writing the past two blog posts), I decided to head out to a nearby park. I wanted to spend the day very relaxed, so walking around the park seemed like a good idea (and a good way to learn my new camera)!

    This flowerbed is right outside the hostel.
    OLYMPUS C4100

    Honestly, not a lot to say here – most of these pictures are from the park!

    These tiles were cute!

    One thing I did notice walking around (that I had heard before) was that there are a lot of vending machines – on the corners of streets, tucked among residential houses. Mostly they have drinks, and one even had alcohol? This is how I know the legal drinking age in Japan is apparently 20 years.

    Of course, I also took pictures of vehicles. There are a ton of kei vehicles here (Kei vehicles are a specific class of car in Japan, limited to a certain size and engine displacement. In return for the limits, they are cheaper and get tax benefits compared to normal cars)

    This moped had a “The North Face” and Prius Hybrid Energy badge on it. Somehow I doubt this scooter is a hybrid…

    There are still more mopeds here, and more bikes even. I’d say there are more cars than mopeds, but about the same number of bikes as cars.

    …

    More pillars for Felix!
    There were a lot of gardens as part of the park.
    I sat here for a while, reading.
    If you look really close, this is a selfie!
    I thought this light looked really cool.
    These lanterns were just hanging above this pathway.
    I liked the light sort of filtering into this small courtyard.
    This clock looked really cool among the trees!
    I really liked this poppy against the tile.
    This light tower looked cool framed through this wire fence.
    Another light tower, framed through tree branches.

    As I was sitting here writing this post, another guest checked in – she is here from China, and brought her Erhu (a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument) and she played a bit for us! She played Master Oogway’s theme from Kung Fu Panda – and it was beautiful. She’s been practicing for 20 years!

    This, obviously, is not her – this is just the first good public domain image I could find for an Erhu.

    After the park, I walked back to the hostel, stopping at a local grocery store for a couple of snacks.

    After sitting and writing this blog post for a while, I left again, this time with several other folks from the Hostel, to get sushi at a nearby sushi conveyor belt place.

    I think I got about 7 plates, which cost only about $13.75!

    At this place, you order on a tablet, and then (sometimes as little as 60 seconds later!) your food zooms up on the belt next to the table.

    The squid, close up
    Coffee jelly for desert!

    After the dinner, we walked back to the hostel with a quick stop at a convenience store for drinks and snacks, and then we came back to the hostel to sit around the main area and talk and laugh.

    All for today!

  • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -> Tokyo, Japan: 4/22 & 4/23

    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!

    The Olympus is dead, long live the Olympus!

    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 breakfast
    • Spend my remaining Malaysian cash at a local street market and take more photos Go 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…

    This store clearly used to be a photo store, but isn’t anymore. There were a surprising number of camera/film stores, though!

    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).

    This one is slightly older (2002 vs 2003) and a little lower quality, with 4MP instead of 5, no flip-out screen, and a slightly less nice lens. Fundamentally though, it is a very similar camera.

    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.

    Olympus C4100

    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).

    I’ve seen a few of these not-quite-motorcycle, not-quite-car things around.

    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!

    I love how small these are! With digital cameras it’s not so surprising, but there’s only so small you can get with 35MM film. The cute factor was part of why these were so irresistible.

    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!