Feeling touristy - Odaiba

Yesterday me and David decided we hadn't be nearly touristy enough so far. We met at 10am and set off for Odaiba, an artificial island off Tokyo bay. It was a strange little place with some amazing futuristic architecture and stunning views across the bay.

You take a driverless transit train called the Yurikamome line. We couldn't work how if it was a monorail or on a track - wikipedia informs me that it's on wheels and is guided by the side walls.

A peek of Tokyo Tower between the sky scrapers.

 Past some ships in the harbour.

 Tokyo Big Sight, or the Tokyo Exhibition Centre. What an amazing building! This is where the guys went to a games expo a couple of weeks ago.

 The back of the Fuji Television building.

 A slightly better view of the fuji television building. I'm not really sure why this little artificial island off Tokyo bay seems to be a hub of futuristic buildings like this but it's quite an impressive sight.

 Me beside the sized down statue of liberty. Your guess is as good as mine as to why it's here...

The Rainbow Bridge which we had previously crossed on the Yurikamome train.

After checking out the view across the bay and the bizarre statue we turned around to explore what was on the island. There were a few office towers, such as the television centre, and in one we discovered the Shell museum. Yep, a museum dedicated to the oil company Shell. If you couldn't guess; it was dull. Luckily for us it was free entry and consisted of one room so the whole experience was over quickly. It was mainly company propaganda and promises about how green their intentions were. I didn't buy into it, nor did I buy anything from the gift shop which was actually larger than the museum itself.

Beyond the office buildings was a pedestrian suspension bridge across a motorway, on the other side of which was probably Tokyo's answer to Blackpool. There was a sorry looking outlet shopping centre, a large car showroom, an arcade and a pretty awesome ferris wheel.

 Just like the Tokyo Tower, it has been painted this hideous 'international orange and white' due to aviation rules (I wonder how the Eiffel tower gets away with being green?).

 Me and David decided to give it a go and were just about the first people to ride it on the day. Because there was no queue and it didn't cost more I took an executive decision that we wanted the glass bottomed pod (you might be able to see it on the photo above this one, the pods which are a different shape to the rest). As it turns out David has a mild fear of heights so I guess I enjoyed it more than he did...

The view from the ferris wheel was fantastic and, luckily, the glass bottomed floor had gotten pretty scratched from use so it didn't feel unsafe (well, I didn't think so).

 The tallest car storage elevator I've seen so far. It went down into the building containing the car show room, I guess these were just surplus cars in storage for the moment.

 A huge container ship docked in the harbour.

 A view of the back of the Fuji Television building. I really did love this building more than I was expecting to, it's just so brave and unusual.

 Tokyo traffic; better than London's at the same time of day I'd say.

After getting off the ferris wheel we had a wander into an amusement arcade. I guess because it was early afternoon on a Wednesday the place was deserted. Here's what we found:

 Pachinko. Strange gambling game played with little silver balls, sort of like pinball I guess. I have no idea how to play but this game is hugely popular. All over Tokyo there are pachinko parlours with storeys and storeys of these machines with flashing lights and noises and they're all very popular with the Japanese. I'm still too baffled to give it a go, but I hear it's very addictive.

 Weird ride on animals.

 Purikura booths. I mentioned these in a previous post, these are the photo machines with green screens that distort your eyes and mouth. They're usually sponsored by a company of some sort, often make up; one machine we've used gave me some free fake eyelashes. This time me and David opted for a Hello Kitty booth.

As we were leaving we noticed a fortune telling shrine - if I remember correctly you chose a paper slip with your fortune on it, read it, and if you don't like it you tie it on the grate. Anything for a bit of luck at the pachinko machines, I guess!

At this point we left Odaiba, so I'll end this post here. Still a lot more photos to come, I took about 300 from the whole day! Next post(s): sushi on a conveyour belt, Zojoji shrine and Tokyo tower at dusk.

Menu

I guess when you chose food by pointing to a picture on the menu, eventually you're gonna chose something with peanuts in it. Whoops.

Earthquake

I guess the upside of seismic activity in Japan is monkeys in hot springs, whilst the downside is the earth likes to ACTUALLY BLOODY MOVE every once in a while.

Recently people have been talking about earthquakes; people have been woken up in the middle of the night swearing they felt one, stuff like that. But today my phone started making an alarming siren noise and, whilst the message title was 'Earthquake notice', the rest of the message was helpfully in Japanese so I have no idea what it said.

A quick google led me to the Japanese Meteorological Society where, it turned out, 3 minutes previously there had been an earthquake somewhere north of Tokyo at 5.8 on the richter scale. Sweet huh?

Massive catch up

I haven't written here for a few days now and there's so much to write about! I admire Myra's blog, it's so up to date and concise (there's a link to it on the right). I could easily ramble on for pages and pages but no one would read it and I can't be bothered with that, so I'll stick to my list formula. I like lists, you know where you are with a good list. Just some disconnected points of things I've noticed or have happened to me recently.

• Long plastic umbrellas. When it looks like it's going to rain everyone has one hooked over their arm, even small school children. They do sell compact umbrellas but everyone uses the long ones. And outside lots of shops there's a stand with long plastic umbrella bags to put a wet umbrella into when you go in the shop to keep the floor dry. Good thinking, huh?
• Banks suck. Just give me my money! I guess I should have informed santander I was moving to Japan for a bit, and I guess some of the transactions done recently look hella dodgy, but still. Thank God that's all sorted out. Which leads me to...
• Skype rules. Seriously love being able to talk face to face with Q and Mum and Dad. Especially reassuring when instances such as those mentioned in bullet point 2 occur.
• Tiny tiny dogs. I guess they fit better into tiny Tokyo apartments.
• Walk on the left. There are ridgy flagstones down the centre of all the pavements to help you keep to the correct side.
• None of the rules apply to bikes. Seriously, why are bikes allowed on the pavement.
• Buying onigiri without being able to read Japanese is for the brave. I usually aim for the pinky orangey label which has lovely fishy tasting pink stuff in it, yum yum, alas today I picked up ikura which, as I learnt, is salmon roe. Not what I needed when I was feeling delicate.
• The honesty of Japanese people. Maybe I'm making sweeping generalisations here (at least it's a positive one) but stuff just doesn't get stolen here. David left his wallet on the bar of a dodgy club for 5 minutes and when he remembered it was still sitting there, untouched. Karan lost his brand new, less than 12 hours old mobile phone in a club. The lady who found it spent all night ringing his contacts trying to arrange for us to collect it and then agreed to post it to him the next day. Perhaps we've been lucky but seriously, how lovely is that.
• 100 yen shops are addictive.
• Fur lined ceremonial gowns aren't a good idea in 35 degrees and 60% humidity. Poor professors at the opening ceremony.
• Purikura is fun!  These large photo booths you go into, you have about 5 or 6 photos taken in really quick succession against a green screen, then you run out of the booth to a screen behind the camera where you can edit the photos. The program automatically edits it to give you massive eyes, small mouth and clear skin, then you can give them cute borders and stuff, and you print them out as stickers, infrared and/or email it to your phone. It's really fun and doing it makes you feel very Japanese.

kinda scary, kinda cute

I could have written so much more but this will do for now. Lots of photos to come too! Lessons finally begin for me tomorrow so I'm quite excited to see how that goes. My first class is Japanese so hopefully I can keep up - I'm in the lowest level so I guess I don't really have a choice. I'm also sort of squatting in my accomodation at the minute... I wasn't able to pay my rent to due to my bank card being blocked. Not exactly an ideal start.

Photo post

I can't be bothered to write loads so instead you get a photo post. :)

Some things I've bought:

A happy sweeper! There's a whole range of everyday stuff with smiley faces from the 100yen shop, super kawaii.

Tea in a bottle. Still not brave enough to try it yet.

Onigiri box, to stop your rice triangles from getting bashed

My Inkan, a seal or stamp you need for some banks instead of a signature. Mine says グラハムフィオナ which is Graham Fiona in katakana.

We went to an Okonomiyaki place on the top floor of an Electrics department store in Akihabara. You chose what type of meat and with or without ramen, then they heat up the hot plate in front of you and cook it. We were all starving when we ordered, it was torture seeing the food being cooked! In this photo is cabbage, potato, egg, ramen in one of them, and seafood or a type of meat mixed together. On top are fishy flakes that don't really taste but the heat made them all flicker and move. 

Here they are finished, with mayo and okonomiyaki sauce on it. It was like a strange twist on bubble and squeak, but very tasty.

The view from Takadanobaba station which is a 5 minute walk from our dorm. 

A street leading away from Shibuya crossing, looks like the channel 4 ident to me!

Lots more to come! Tomorrow we're going to the fish market and a tour to Ueno so I'll get snap happy then.

Day 2

Blimey, I've been here for less than two days and it's fantastic so far! I feel stupid knowing no Japanese, I will have to pick it up quickly.

So, since I arrived it's been busy busy busy. Yesterday was hectic to say the least; the plane journey was easy but boring and uncomfortable. Then getting from the airport to the halls was fine and would have been so much harder without the help of Japanese students, as I mentioned below.

Today I was met face to face with Japanese red tape, or at least their love of forms filled out neatly with no crossings out. We went into the university for 9.30 (everyone was late which, we were told by the dean, is very un-Japanese). Then we met some of the students from yesterday who were lovely and helpful who played some games with us. It was really funny, considering there must have been over 100 people in the room, to play these simple games en masse. The first game was 6 people stood at the front and each shouted a different word but at the same time and we had to work out what each person was saying. I was terrible at it, because I know no bloody Japanese, but it was fun. Then a different society got a group of 6 students to stand at the front, gave each of them a cream puff but some of them contained mustard. They would all eat them at the same time and we had to guess who had eaten mustard puffs just by their faces. Simple but very fun to watch!

Then we spent the rest of the day with a tour of the campus, some free sandwiches, lots of presentations about rules we should obey and that sort of thing. Then we spent aaggeess filling out form to do with health insurance and foreign registration. It was a bit of a nightmare but helpfully they went through it step by step with us in English. The big problems for me in the forms were 1) I can't read kanji which some of the forms were entirely written in, 2) it might be 2010 but in emperor years it's 22, 3) my accomodation is called 'Waseda University Nishi Waseda International Student House' which is a bit of a mouthful to say, never mind to write in small boxes on forms that have to be pristine.

So once that was all done I wandered home and had my first encounter with a Japanese supermarket. I know I'll probably look back on this blog in a few months time and cringe, but yeah, I found the supermarket a bit bewildering. It stocked many things I recognised but also a helluva lot that I just didn't have a clue. I was nervous to buy cooking ingredients because I havn't fully scouted out the kitchen yet so I bought some sort of pork bento box (rice with thinly chopped pork in a sauce with sesame seeds and some cabbage, I think it was cabbage) for my tea, plus some milk to make tea (yeeey) and croissants for breakfast. Really Japanese, that.

After this Jessi, Nicole, Haru and me for a wander up to Takadanobaba (a 5 minute walk away!) where we bought some stuff in the 100yen shop then went to a cheap bar where all the drinks were 380yen. I loved the bar; we had to take off our shoes at the entrance and walk around in bare feet and even the staff were just in socks. We were shown to a low Japanese style table with cushions around it. It wasn't very easy on the knees but it was fun. Plus, instead of a waiter taking your order, there was a touch screen with the menu on it - you simply select what everyone wants then send it to be made and they turn up 5 minutes later! Genius.

Tomorrow I get a lie in, thank god. I haven't even started unpacking yet, I need to start making this place more homey. Thanks to everyone who has messaged me or said good luck - I appreciate it!

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Blaarrrghhh! Brain melt, chocolate melt, melt melt melt. It's SO HOT and humid here. I was travelling for a good 20 hours or so and barely slept on the plane (I never do) but somehow I'm here in my little Japanese dorm room, with all of my luggage. Some extremely kind Japanese students met us at the airport and pointed us in the right direction and then some more even NICER Japanese students met us at Shinjuku station, took us (i.e. a little japanese girl in heels wheeled my 26kg suitcase) to Takadanobaba station where we took a bus then walked to the dorm. Then a very helpful man showed me how to use a key, where to keep my shoes and the extractor fan for the laundry rooms (I know a good joke about an extractor fan but this isn't the time) and bleerghh my brain has just MELTED with info OVERLOAD.

I seriously need a shower. Chronically.

THE PILLOW IS A BEANBAG?!