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May. 28th, 2003 10:59 amSoooo.. I have really done a big update yet cause I've been using the crappy Gator-ated PC at the hotel and can't be arsed thinking of stuff at Y15/minute (~20c/min), however I've just worked out that I could actually bring my laptop down and plug it in (at the same price tho :P), so I'm writing this offline and will post it when I get there.
I am staying at a place "near" Minowa station.. but it seems like a very long-ass way when you're dragging a suitcase, I think it took me about 30 very very sucky minutes to get there from the time I got off the train. Not carrying the suitcase is a 5 minutes stroll. It would appear that the initial builders of the subway didn't think that escalators/lifts would be an absolute necessity.. so I had to lug my suitcase up about.. oh.. 5 stories of steps... and then drag it about 600 metres down the road. Stopping every 20 metres to switch hands and get my breath..
I got here, checked in ok, was mildly appauled by the size of my room (or lack thereof), but I've since got used to it, and it's all good now. My alledgedly western room is interesting.. it has something that looks like a bed, but on closer inspection, is actually something made to look like a bed by someone who has not really seen one close up before.. it's about 5cms of "matress" on top of hard wood.. so it's off the ground like a western bed, but really.. sleeping on tatami wouldn't be much different, just closer to the ground, so I'm thankful that I'm not really.. being off the ground at least helps seperate my sleep area from "throw my crap here" area. The "western" showers are likewise constructed.. yes, the water comes out and you can wash yourself with it.. however to make the water come out, you need to hold down a spring loaded lever with one hand, while washing with the other. The end result of this is a lot of time standing around soaping ones self with no water going, an interesting experiance to be sure. But they're bigger than the ones at Neil Wycik in Toronto, so it's not too bad.
Not sleeping much on the flight here and being, well, incredibly fricken knackered from the haul from the train to the hotel, I lay down and had a bit of a rest for most of monday, apart from the bit where I went to Akihabara. I felt my first earthquake on Monday too, while laying down :D Bit of a shake, but nothing too major.
Today the exploration began :D I left here at about 8:30, had some breakfast at Minowa station (Maca Donardos.. can you guess what that is? :D), bought a SF Card (train voucher thingy) and went down to the platform.. uh, lots of people on that train.. let's wait for the next one.. uh, too many people.. next one.. repeat a few times over the space of 15 minutes, then aha! a train with few people! My first stop of the morning was at the Ginza. To quote homer simpson.. "I guess it's pretty big..", but not that big really.. most of the places are haute couteur or restaraunts, but nothing that really grabbed my attention, except a music store.. I had heard that Alanis has released some special albums in Japan only, so I wanted to have a look for them.. but all the CDs are spine out, and on the spine is plain paper covering with the Kana for the artist's name on it... and they don't appear to be in any sort of order.. so I ask. "Do you speak English?" "No" uhh... k.. "*pause* Alanis Morissette?" "Ahh, Aranusu Morisete? *motions to follow*". Heh! But after all that, they didn't have any of the special issues, just the normal albums, and the covers didn't appear to have any Japanese on them, so not really a bit attraction. Ahh well, back to the subways, and to Shinjiku!
Shinjiku has a rep for being a much bigger place for general shopping, and this is true. Lots of people (by now it was lunch time) and more interesting stores, to me anyway, sorry Ginza, but I ain't gonna be buying anything from Tiffany's.. and I can't even take a picture of Daffy outside it, cause I left him at home.. (ps jen, don't be surprised if a duck shaped package arrives for me.. heh!). I had a look around some of the places in the main shopping bit.
I almost typed "touristy bit", but it's not really.. Tokyo doesn't really seem to take the same approach to tourism as most other places, ie souvenier shops everywhere. In fact, I don't think I've actually seen souveniers anywhere yet. Uh, or tourists for that matter. There were a few more gaijin around Shinjuku, but not many.. I think I saw maybe 5 people there who were gaijin folks like me, compared to only one or two in Ginza. It's interesting to be the odd one out :)
And now a few non specific rants and observations about subways and japan in general. Some people may think of japan as a very ordered nation. It's not, not by a long shot. Case in point, subways. Depending usually on which side of the road you drive on (or would drive if you did, m'hey), you usually walk on that side of a sidewalk/stairway. Here, not so much. People walking everywhere.. crossing huge roads, and on both sides there are a few hundred people waiting to cross, meet at the middle and then avoid hitting one-another. In the subways, to help things move quicker, some parts have signs saying "keep left"... and other parts inexplicably have signs saying "keep right". Shinjiku station has a wide stairway leading out, divided into three sections.. up on the left, down on the right, and "fight for it" in the middle. Yay :P Also, street names.. Tokyo doesn't really do them. Some of the really big street have them (Meiji Dori near me), but rest of the rabbit warren of streets between them don't.. none at all. It has block numbers, but they themselves don't really help much unless you know the area really, cause the blocks aren't necessarily in order, and that kinda defeats the purpose of street names, cause if you know the area really well, you don't need them. Another thing.. I'm apparently quite tall (who knew eh? :P).. 6'1" to be imprecise.. most doorways here are about 5'10". I have whacked my head so many times, it's really starting to get not funny. But I guess I can't fault people for making things an economic height.. I mean, if most people who are going to be somewhere are 5'10", why make your doorways 6'6"? Oh, and Japanese people really do bow.. a lot. Like after you've given them the equivalent for A$1.50 for a packet of noodles, there's a bow. I watched in Akihabara too, the more you spend, the deeper the bow. Ok, I know I should have been expecting this, and I actually was, but it's still amusing to actually see. Etiquette says the person in the junior position (ie the one accepting money) must bow deeper than the one in the senior position (ie the one paying money).. which means if the senior person bows back to the junior person, the junior person must bow back, again, and deeper. A most interesting sight, to be sure.
Ok, rant over. After seeing the heady sights of Shinjiku, I headed back to Akihabara :D Mmm. And here, my dear readers, I got my first souveniers of Japan.. an 80GB hard drive for TitanFlakes (AU$460/US$300), a firewire enclosure for the old one (AU$50 and it came with a leather carry case.. ooer. Will probably recycle it onto mum when I get back for her to use for backups.. might see if I can arrange something with Bruce to see if he wants a bigger HDD for his tibook, and mum can have his 20GB..) and a 32MB USB memory key (AU$30) :D This is a DAMN good price.. I can't find the 80GB drives for sale in Australia, as they're pretty new (the one I got has a Manufactured May 03 on it :), but the 60GB are about $600, so the 80GB will probably be about $800. Firewire enclosures for 2.5inch drives seem to start at about $200 in Australia, and the memory key would have been about $60. Why the memory key you ask? Well, I need to get the data from the old drive to the new one, and for that I need a nifty piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner... and I didn't have any way to download it directly onto my computer... a 32MB USB thumb drive is very palmable.. download stuff on a computer in a computer store, nonchalantly plug in drive, copy software on, unplug drive, walk away ;> This was the same store where I got the drive, so I spent money there, so I'm not a total leech on japanese society ;p I didn't buy an ipod.. but came very close.. a second hand one with a physical scroll wheel for about AU$340 is a pretty reasonable price.. but the new ones are very cute, and have solitare on them and come with a case but are about $200 more for a 15GB one. They also had secondhand 20GB ipods for about that price. Hmm must ponder more.
Caught the subway back to the hotel, had some afternoon tea and settled in to an afternoon of hard drive swapping. Now I'm sure you all think I'm some weirdo for making spur of the moment decisions and buying new hard drives, but I actually was planning on doing this, and actually brought along the tools needed to swap out the hard drive, to whit, a torx #8 driver bit and some tweezers/pliers and a small flat bladed screwdriver.. the hard drive was easy enough to change, for a laptop, so out with the 40GB and in with the 80GB and bob's your uncle.. :D Put the 40GB in the enclosure, booted up off it, ran my ill-gotten Carbon Copy Cloner, waited (well, slept actually :) for 4 hours for all the data to copy off and verify, reboot, unplug the 40GB and ees all good mate.. well, lots of it is.. meh, 99.9999% .. close enough ;) The only thing that seems to have gone a bit weird is the hostname it calls itself, which is staying at localhost, instead of being TitanFlakes.local .. ahh well. Easier than reinstalling everything. Computer modification is quite popular in Japan, Akihabara is full of amazing stuff, and to paraphrase an old saying, "When in Rome..". There really is nothing quite like sitting hunchbacked on a bed in a cheap Tokyo hotel (New Koyo is the absolute cheapest hotel in Tokyo :) and changing hard drives in a laptop :) Much like it's precessors, it's named "London 80000". Back in the day, I used to name hard drives/zip drives/jaz drives after citys, followed by the size in megabytes.. the first one thusnamed was "Arecibo 500", 1995 in my Performa 5200. The laptops have been London since I got one in 1998 to take to London Ontario with me ;) London 1300/3200/10000/40000/80000. The new drive is much quieter and faster. Mmmm.
Glavin.
After finishing everything up with Titanflakes at about 7:30, I went next door to the Lawson conveniance store and got some n00dles for dinner.. put in boiling water from the tea machine here, and sat in the lobby/meeting area and chatted with some of the other travellers, like a guy from Vancouver, two guys from france who happened to live in Seoul, and chatted on and off in english and french with them, an english teacher who lives in Fukuoka, but is originally from Wyoming, a new zealand used truck reseller who stays here for business. His rationale is that the rooms are so crap that when he gets back here he doesn't look at the bed longingly and just want to sleep, he works. Heh!
Today I think I'll go to Ueno Park and maybe the Imperial Palace area. Yess. Eeexcellent. I may also go to the imperial war museum, which I hear is an interesting perspective on most of the wars Japan's been envolved in since that Admiral Perry incident. Apparently they HAD to attack Pearl Harbor.. riight.. ahh well, I'll go and see. We're all friends now :) No more Akihabara until.. hmmm.. thursday :P Hmm and in the 20 minutes I've been awake so far, there's been 2 earth tremors that have been noticable while sitting, and a few minor ones I can notice while laying down. I wonder how concerned I should be about this. It IS japan tho, and they do have a LOT of earth tremors...
(Japanese) Bart: "Shall we tell them the secret of the 47 ronin?"
(Japanese) Homer: "No, they are foreign devils"
I am staying at a place "near" Minowa station.. but it seems like a very long-ass way when you're dragging a suitcase, I think it took me about 30 very very sucky minutes to get there from the time I got off the train. Not carrying the suitcase is a 5 minutes stroll. It would appear that the initial builders of the subway didn't think that escalators/lifts would be an absolute necessity.. so I had to lug my suitcase up about.. oh.. 5 stories of steps... and then drag it about 600 metres down the road. Stopping every 20 metres to switch hands and get my breath..
I got here, checked in ok, was mildly appauled by the size of my room (or lack thereof), but I've since got used to it, and it's all good now. My alledgedly western room is interesting.. it has something that looks like a bed, but on closer inspection, is actually something made to look like a bed by someone who has not really seen one close up before.. it's about 5cms of "matress" on top of hard wood.. so it's off the ground like a western bed, but really.. sleeping on tatami wouldn't be much different, just closer to the ground, so I'm thankful that I'm not really.. being off the ground at least helps seperate my sleep area from "throw my crap here" area. The "western" showers are likewise constructed.. yes, the water comes out and you can wash yourself with it.. however to make the water come out, you need to hold down a spring loaded lever with one hand, while washing with the other. The end result of this is a lot of time standing around soaping ones self with no water going, an interesting experiance to be sure. But they're bigger than the ones at Neil Wycik in Toronto, so it's not too bad.
Not sleeping much on the flight here and being, well, incredibly fricken knackered from the haul from the train to the hotel, I lay down and had a bit of a rest for most of monday, apart from the bit where I went to Akihabara. I felt my first earthquake on Monday too, while laying down :D Bit of a shake, but nothing too major.
Today the exploration began :D I left here at about 8:30, had some breakfast at Minowa station (Maca Donardos.. can you guess what that is? :D), bought a SF Card (train voucher thingy) and went down to the platform.. uh, lots of people on that train.. let's wait for the next one.. uh, too many people.. next one.. repeat a few times over the space of 15 minutes, then aha! a train with few people! My first stop of the morning was at the Ginza. To quote homer simpson.. "I guess it's pretty big..", but not that big really.. most of the places are haute couteur or restaraunts, but nothing that really grabbed my attention, except a music store.. I had heard that Alanis has released some special albums in Japan only, so I wanted to have a look for them.. but all the CDs are spine out, and on the spine is plain paper covering with the Kana for the artist's name on it... and they don't appear to be in any sort of order.. so I ask. "Do you speak English?" "No" uhh... k.. "*pause* Alanis Morissette?" "Ahh, Aranusu Morisete? *motions to follow*". Heh! But after all that, they didn't have any of the special issues, just the normal albums, and the covers didn't appear to have any Japanese on them, so not really a bit attraction. Ahh well, back to the subways, and to Shinjiku!
Shinjiku has a rep for being a much bigger place for general shopping, and this is true. Lots of people (by now it was lunch time) and more interesting stores, to me anyway, sorry Ginza, but I ain't gonna be buying anything from Tiffany's.. and I can't even take a picture of Daffy outside it, cause I left him at home.. (ps jen, don't be surprised if a duck shaped package arrives for me.. heh!). I had a look around some of the places in the main shopping bit.
I almost typed "touristy bit", but it's not really.. Tokyo doesn't really seem to take the same approach to tourism as most other places, ie souvenier shops everywhere. In fact, I don't think I've actually seen souveniers anywhere yet. Uh, or tourists for that matter. There were a few more gaijin around Shinjuku, but not many.. I think I saw maybe 5 people there who were gaijin folks like me, compared to only one or two in Ginza. It's interesting to be the odd one out :)
And now a few non specific rants and observations about subways and japan in general. Some people may think of japan as a very ordered nation. It's not, not by a long shot. Case in point, subways. Depending usually on which side of the road you drive on (or would drive if you did, m'hey), you usually walk on that side of a sidewalk/stairway. Here, not so much. People walking everywhere.. crossing huge roads, and on both sides there are a few hundred people waiting to cross, meet at the middle and then avoid hitting one-another. In the subways, to help things move quicker, some parts have signs saying "keep left"... and other parts inexplicably have signs saying "keep right". Shinjiku station has a wide stairway leading out, divided into three sections.. up on the left, down on the right, and "fight for it" in the middle. Yay :P Also, street names.. Tokyo doesn't really do them. Some of the really big street have them (Meiji Dori near me), but rest of the rabbit warren of streets between them don't.. none at all. It has block numbers, but they themselves don't really help much unless you know the area really, cause the blocks aren't necessarily in order, and that kinda defeats the purpose of street names, cause if you know the area really well, you don't need them. Another thing.. I'm apparently quite tall (who knew eh? :P).. 6'1" to be imprecise.. most doorways here are about 5'10". I have whacked my head so many times, it's really starting to get not funny. But I guess I can't fault people for making things an economic height.. I mean, if most people who are going to be somewhere are 5'10", why make your doorways 6'6"? Oh, and Japanese people really do bow.. a lot. Like after you've given them the equivalent for A$1.50 for a packet of noodles, there's a bow. I watched in Akihabara too, the more you spend, the deeper the bow. Ok, I know I should have been expecting this, and I actually was, but it's still amusing to actually see. Etiquette says the person in the junior position (ie the one accepting money) must bow deeper than the one in the senior position (ie the one paying money).. which means if the senior person bows back to the junior person, the junior person must bow back, again, and deeper. A most interesting sight, to be sure.
Ok, rant over. After seeing the heady sights of Shinjiku, I headed back to Akihabara :D Mmm. And here, my dear readers, I got my first souveniers of Japan.. an 80GB hard drive for TitanFlakes (AU$460/US$300), a firewire enclosure for the old one (AU$50 and it came with a leather carry case.. ooer. Will probably recycle it onto mum when I get back for her to use for backups.. might see if I can arrange something with Bruce to see if he wants a bigger HDD for his tibook, and mum can have his 20GB..) and a 32MB USB memory key (AU$30) :D This is a DAMN good price.. I can't find the 80GB drives for sale in Australia, as they're pretty new (the one I got has a Manufactured May 03 on it :), but the 60GB are about $600, so the 80GB will probably be about $800. Firewire enclosures for 2.5inch drives seem to start at about $200 in Australia, and the memory key would have been about $60. Why the memory key you ask? Well, I need to get the data from the old drive to the new one, and for that I need a nifty piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner... and I didn't have any way to download it directly onto my computer... a 32MB USB thumb drive is very palmable.. download stuff on a computer in a computer store, nonchalantly plug in drive, copy software on, unplug drive, walk away ;> This was the same store where I got the drive, so I spent money there, so I'm not a total leech on japanese society ;p I didn't buy an ipod.. but came very close.. a second hand one with a physical scroll wheel for about AU$340 is a pretty reasonable price.. but the new ones are very cute, and have solitare on them and come with a case but are about $200 more for a 15GB one. They also had secondhand 20GB ipods for about that price. Hmm must ponder more.
Caught the subway back to the hotel, had some afternoon tea and settled in to an afternoon of hard drive swapping. Now I'm sure you all think I'm some weirdo for making spur of the moment decisions and buying new hard drives, but I actually was planning on doing this, and actually brought along the tools needed to swap out the hard drive, to whit, a torx #8 driver bit and some tweezers/pliers and a small flat bladed screwdriver.. the hard drive was easy enough to change, for a laptop, so out with the 40GB and in with the 80GB and bob's your uncle.. :D Put the 40GB in the enclosure, booted up off it, ran my ill-gotten Carbon Copy Cloner, waited (well, slept actually :) for 4 hours for all the data to copy off and verify, reboot, unplug the 40GB and ees all good mate.. well, lots of it is.. meh, 99.9999% .. close enough ;) The only thing that seems to have gone a bit weird is the hostname it calls itself, which is staying at localhost, instead of being TitanFlakes.local .. ahh well. Easier than reinstalling everything. Computer modification is quite popular in Japan, Akihabara is full of amazing stuff, and to paraphrase an old saying, "When in Rome..". There really is nothing quite like sitting hunchbacked on a bed in a cheap Tokyo hotel (New Koyo is the absolute cheapest hotel in Tokyo :) and changing hard drives in a laptop :) Much like it's precessors, it's named "London 80000". Back in the day, I used to name hard drives/zip drives/jaz drives after citys, followed by the size in megabytes.. the first one thusnamed was "Arecibo 500", 1995 in my Performa 5200. The laptops have been London since I got one in 1998 to take to London Ontario with me ;) London 1300/3200/10000/40000/80000. The new drive is much quieter and faster. Mmmm.
Glavin.
After finishing everything up with Titanflakes at about 7:30, I went next door to the Lawson conveniance store and got some n00dles for dinner.. put in boiling water from the tea machine here, and sat in the lobby/meeting area and chatted with some of the other travellers, like a guy from Vancouver, two guys from france who happened to live in Seoul, and chatted on and off in english and french with them, an english teacher who lives in Fukuoka, but is originally from Wyoming, a new zealand used truck reseller who stays here for business. His rationale is that the rooms are so crap that when he gets back here he doesn't look at the bed longingly and just want to sleep, he works. Heh!
Today I think I'll go to Ueno Park and maybe the Imperial Palace area. Yess. Eeexcellent. I may also go to the imperial war museum, which I hear is an interesting perspective on most of the wars Japan's been envolved in since that Admiral Perry incident. Apparently they HAD to attack Pearl Harbor.. riight.. ahh well, I'll go and see. We're all friends now :) No more Akihabara until.. hmmm.. thursday :P Hmm and in the 20 minutes I've been awake so far, there's been 2 earth tremors that have been noticable while sitting, and a few minor ones I can notice while laying down. I wonder how concerned I should be about this. It IS japan tho, and they do have a LOT of earth tremors...
(Japanese) Bart: "Shall we tell them the secret of the 47 ronin?"
(Japanese) Homer: "No, they are foreign devils"
