Our Swanky Digs

Since the last time we were in Japan we didn't post--or even take--any pictures of where we were staying, we decided to make up for it this time. So this post is devoted to showing off our guest house. It'll be informative and interesting, I promise.



Here's the doorway when you first walk in. The area with the shoes is called the genkan, and since, in Japan, you don't wear your shoes indoors (so you don't drag in all the dirt from outside), you take your shoes off there before walking inside.



If you're standing in the genkan, this is what you can see. On the left is the door to our room. In the middle is the bathroom, and the door on the right leads to the toilet. 

In this picture, I'm standing in the doorway of our room, looking straight across. You can see the genkan on the right, the door to the toilet on the left, and the kitchen/common area and the other two rooms there in the middle. Both our roommates, Thomas and Frederick, are from France. They're pretty much always in the common area.

You've already seen our room, so let's start with the bathroom.

Obviously, on the right is the sink/vanity area. To the left of that is the washing machine. (In between them, you can see the hose of our little vacuum cleaner). And to the left of that, you can see the corner of our shower curtain. We'll check that out in a minute. First, we'll take a closer look at the washing machine. Fascinating.

Look at all those buttons! They tell you (from left to right) the water level, which cycle it's on, and how long of a cycle it is--90 or 30 minutes. Then there's the start button, and which course it's on. The last button is some sort of "auto off" thing. I'm not sure.

See that word right below the arrow? The one that says ドライ? That means this washing machine is equipped with a drying cycle! So you can wash and dry all in one! I definitely prefer that to hanging laundry to dry, which we had to do last time.

To the left of the washing machine, this is the entrance to the shower. You've got a shower curtain outside, and a door with frosted glass inside so no one can see you while you're bathing.

When you step into the shower, this is what you see. It looks pretty complicated, but it's not. That long, metal bar toward the bottom has a dial on the left to control the temperature, and the dial on the right controls which spigot the water comes out of. Turn it down, and the water comes out of the bottom. Turn it up and the water comes out of the shower head (which you can't see in the picture, but is at the end of the long cord). That little thing on the wall tells you the water temperature or something. I like to think of it as the shower's own thermostat. I honestly have no idea, but it looks to me like it'd be dangerous to have an electronic gadget so close to water. In the bottom right corner of the picture, you can see the other shower curtain.



This is what's behind it. You have a little cart (on the raised portion of the floor... the shower part is lowered so the whole floor doesn't get wet) where you can put your towel and clothes for after your shower. The curtain is there so they don't get wet while you bathe. Pretty clever.




Obviously, this is the toilet. That's all that's in here. On the back of the toilet is a sink (which doesn't work here). Normally, when you flush, the water that goes to refill the tank will come out of the faucet and you use it to wash your hands. Yes, obviously it's clean water. I don't know why this one doesn't work. 





Here we have the common area (with a small TV) and kitchen. Pretty self-explanatory.

 

This is the fridge, and a little cart with the microwave and toaster oven. Next to the cart are four trash cans. This is because you have to separate your trash when you throw it out. Burnables (paper products, mostly) go in one can, non-burnables (plastic and such) go in another. Recyclable PET bottles (anything with a number 1 or 2, basically) go in one, and cans and glass bottles go in the fourth. And they all have different trash days. Burnables go out twice a week.

And lastly, here's the rest of the kitchen. As you can see, we have a set-top 2 burner stove, but no oven. Those are hard to come by around here, as most Japanese people (at least in Tokyo) don't do a whole lot of baking.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our place. Stay tuned for more exciting adventures, like our harrowing trip to Nippon Seinen-kan Hall! (And if anyone can tell me why the white background of our layout keeps messing up--and how to fix it--please let me know!)

First Day Jitters

The current time is 12:10am on Saturday, and I'm surprisingly not too terribly tired. I'm sure I will be by the time I finish this post, but I wanted to get started with the more fun parts of our posts--pictures! So this post will be about our long, long, tiring journey to Japan.

It started bright and early... okay, dark and early Wednesday morning--4am, to be exact. I got a late start packing, so I just stayed up all night (as usual), but I got it all done!



That's my suitcase in the midst of the packing. I was able to pack less this time, so now I have room for more goodies!

After all the packing was done, we headed off to the airport. Got there shortly after 5am, made it through security with little problem, and waited at the gate for our plane to board.



Here's Cinnamon snacking on a mini bagel while we wait (please notice it's still very dark outside). Finally, we were able to board, and 2.5 hours later, we landed in Chicago at O'hare International Airport. There was snow on the ground!





Naturally, I had to snap a picture of it, as I hadn't seen snow in person (even if I didn't get to touch it) in a good 20 years. That picture of a footprint was out on the tarmac and was taken while we sat inside waiting for our connecting flight. It's nice to have a camera with 20x zoom.


We landed at about 8:30am (which is 9:30am EST), and our next flight wasn't until 12:02pm. So we went to Chili's and had breakfast. Yes, breakfast. I didn't know they served it, but I'm guessing it's solely an airport offering. And let me tell you, it's painfully obvious the people who work there hate their jobs.


After our nourishing breakfast, we made our way to the gate and waited.





Cinnamon took a little nap. I took pictures of Cinnamon.



I also snapped a shot of our plane--this gigantic looking 747. Last time we flew to Japan, we took a 777. This one didn't have video screens on the back of each seat.

After what seemed like a small eternity, we finally got to board. This time around, I had a window seat, Cinnamon had an aisle seat, and the seat in the middle was empty. ...Or so we thought. I arrived at row 41 only to find some guy sitting in my window seat! Cinnamon and I were most unhappy. But we sat down anyway and made ourselves comfortable. Sort of. We were running a bit behind because they had to load some more cargo, and while we were sitting there, I noticed in the row in front of us, only the aisle seat was occupied. So I very kindly asked this seat-usurper if he wouldn't mind moving up a row so we'd all have some more space. Thankfully, he complied, and we were able to have our free seat for stretching out a bit.


We were very glad to have it, as 13 hours on a plane will certainly make you want to move. For whatever reason, even though I had been awake nearly 24 hours at that point, I wasn't very sleepy. I napped a few times, but probably got off the plane with no more than an hour and a half of sleep under my belt. I whiled the time away reading magazines, listening to music, and being awed by the spectacular aerial view of the Canadian Rockies and the vast, snowy mountains of Alaska. Who knew the Pacific Ocean could ice over so far out! It was neat to see, though... all the snow-capped peaks, frozen rivers and ice floes.

Cinnamon, on the other hand, didn't fare quite as well as I did on the flight. She was uncomfortable and didn't feel very well. I felt bad for her, but there wasn't much I could do. I let her sleep on my lap for a bit and tried not to disturb her when she was trying to nap. Not much else you really can do when you're 33,000ft above ground and going roughly 530mph. If you've ever thought an 8 hour shift at work went by at a snail's pace, try being cooped up on an airplane in economy for 13 hours. It's one of the reasons why I don't understand how anyone can visit this country for only a week. 


But finally--just when I thought I couldn't take another minute--we landed in Japan, flying over brown fields and wide rivers before touching down at Narita airport. Immigration and customs were a breeze, and we hit up the ATM for some cash before heading down to buy our tickets for the Narita Express (or N'EX) that would take us into Tokyo proper in only 90 minutes. For some reason, we didn't think to buy the tickets together, and since all seats on the train are reserved (as in, you can't just sit wherever you want), we ended up getting seats 5 cars apart. 





Those are the seats on the train. After being stuck in economy on the plane, I'm always happy to be on a long distance train in Japan -- there's so much legroom!





And here's the view from my window, looking out at Narita Airport Terminal 1's station. Not a lot going on there at 5:15pm.





Leaving the station, you can now see some people moving about. I had intended to take more pictures along the ride, but by the time we left the underground station and saw the outside world, it was nearly dark outside! I'm definitely not used to darkness falling at 5pm! Clearly Florida has spoiled me.


We made it into Shinjuku around 6:45pm, and signed the lease on our guest house at the office and picked up our rental phones. We were given a very widemouthed cup of hot green matcha tea, along with two sweets that were either daifuku or mochi maybe. One was square (about an inch on all sides), brown, and kind of sticky-chewy. The other was very similar in consistency, but was round and had a flaky coating on the outside. Either way, they were tasty.


After that was all settled, we just had to go find our place. Much to Cinnamon's dismay, we decided to simply walk to the place instead of taking the train, which would have been faster, but also a lot harder at 8pm, and with quite a bit of luggage. It took us about 20 or so minutes to find our place. It's in a building whose small entrance is sandwiched between a florist and... some other shop I never looked at very closely. 


We had to haul our luggage up a rather narrow staircase in order to get to our second floor room, but we finally made it! So here it is:





This is what you see when you first walk into the room (nevermind the luggage). On the right is a window, and on the left is a tiny balcony that I later found out basically exists just to hold the external part of our room's AC/heating unit.





I'm standing on the bed to take this picture, but here you can see the futon, the door, and our very large closet. Strangely, this time around, we have plenty of places to put our clothes... but no hangers. How inconvenient!





Lastly, you can see our dinky little shelves, complete with some dishes. This room is much bigger than our place in Shirokanedai was. I'd say it's probably 12'x12' or so. But I've gotta say if there's one thing I already miss about the US, it's central heating. Here, we have our own heater in our room, but as soon as you step outside to go to the kitchen or bathroom (both very close-by), it gets cold! There's no heating unit out there, so it tends to be awfully close to whatever the external temperature is. Certainly not fun when you want to take a shower.

We did meet one of the guys who's also staying here (there are two other rooms on this floor). His name is Thomas and he's from France. That's pretty much all we know at this point. We weren't feeling particularly chatty, so we pretty much went right to bed.


Today, we decided to take it easy, since we learned the hard way last time what happens when you get too ambitious that first day. I woke up at 7am (yes, me--Persimmon) because my left arm was asleep and numb, and then I couldn't go back to sleep. Cinnamon woke up an hour or so later, I think. We decided to go get some food, then go to the grocery store to pick up some things for later on.





But first, while Cinnamon was in the shower, I snapped these photos of the "view" from our balcony. We're on the back side of the building, so as you can imagine, there's nothing much to see. Judging by how close those other buildings are, you can see now why all the glass in people's homes is frosted for privacy.





Down below the balcony, there are some bikes. And that's really about all that's outside. Not too fascinating. Last time we at least had a tiny "garden" (we're talking about a foot and a half wide).


We ended up going to two different 100 yen shops that were across the street from each other. At one, we picked up some food, and at the other, we bought some hangers, soap, laundry detergent, and a little plastic basket with handles to put our shower things in. Then it was back home to eat!





This was my first meal: a carton of strawberry milk (marketed as "strawberry au lait"), chocolate chip melon bread, which--as you may recall--I made and brought in to work almost a year ago now! I really missed this stuff. It was huge and filling, and only cost me 105 (which is now the equivalent of $1.15). And I bought some nikuman, which is essentially meat inside a dough "bun" that's steamed. I haven't eaten them yet, so I'll let you know how they are.





Cinnamon got some yogurt, though I don't know what flavor it is. Strawberry? She also got a little apple pastry/danish type thing, and a little carton of the tiniest, cutest, most perfect strawberries I have ever seen. She took pictures of them, so I'm sure she'll post them for you all to see. American strawberries look like overgrown monsters compared to these. And she got some sort of hot noodle cup to eat later.


After eating, we ended up not going to the grocery store, as we were both pretty tired. Around 4pm, Cinnamon declared it naptime and ended up sleeping until about 8pm.

We were supposed to go meet Courtney and a friend of hers for curry at Coco's after the show they were seeing was over (around 9pm), but Cinnamon still wasn't feeling very well, so I went next door to the Family Mart and bought her some crackers. She stayed home, and I went out for curry. Turns out two other people came along too, so it was a lot of fun chatting with them and eating delicious curry. But man was it cold out there! When I left, it was windy and about 39 degrees, so it felt much colder. By the time I made it to Coco's, I could hardly feel my hands or my face. The walk home was better because the wind had died down a bit. As of right now, it's 36 degrees with a wind chill of 31. Tomorrow, it's supposed to be 45 (today got up to 48). 

And right now, it's already 1:42am, so I'm going to brush my teeth and hop into bed. Sorry this post was so long. I'll try to keep them shorter in the future, but I hope you still enjoyed reading about our adventures... or at least the pictures. 

Until next time!

Okerinasai!

Just checking in for our first post from across the Pacific. It's currently 9:15pm here (Thursday), and we just got all settled in to our new place about half an hour ago. Cinnamon is already sleeping, and I will be following her shortly. Pictures and a real post forthcoming, after some much needed sleep.

On Our Way

Good morning, world! It is currently 2:10am, and I am still awake. I'd like to be asleep, but it's kind of a bad idea to do that if you're not done packing. Okay, that's not entirely true. I'm pretty much done with packing, but because I didn't start until about 9:30pm, I finished late and missed my chance to nap.

In about an hour, Cinnamon will be awake, and an hour and a half from now, we will be on our way to the Jacksonville airport to catch our flight. We're flying from Jacksonville to Chicago, and from Chicago to Tokyo. That last leg involves a 13 hour flight, so if we don't update our blog to say we're alive and settled in right away, we hope you'll understand. 

Let's put this in perspective. We leave Chicago at 12:03pm Wednesday. By the time we arrive in Tokyo, it will be 4:15pm Thursday (that's local time, of course). From the airport, it's a 90 minute train ride to Shinjuku, where we have to check in and pay our rent for the place where we're staying. That generally takes about half an hour. Then we have to find the place, which hopefully won't take too long. Last time we wandered in the wrong direction for about 45 minutes, but this time we have a very good sense of direction in the city, so it shouldn't be nearly that long (or frustrating). In any case, by the time we get to a place where we can finally lie down on a real bed and sleep, it will probably be close to 7:30pm, so it's very likely we'll just pass out for a good 14 hours or so.

Time to go take care of some last minute business. Next time you hear from us, we'll be on the other side of the world!

A Winter Theme

Most of you didn't get to see what the blog looked like when I created it, but over the past few days, I've revamped the layout to make it a little more personal. It now has a sort of wintry theme, and I added in the polaroids using pictures I took on our last trip to Japan. If anything doesn't look quite right to you, let me know and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

For those of you interested or curious, this time around, we will be 14 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. (So just add two hours to the current time and change AM to PM or vice versa. 12:26am becomes 2:26pm, for example). However, there's one little exception. On March 14th, the US observes the start of Daylight Savings Time. Japan doesn't observe it, so from March 14th to the 17th, we will only be 13 hours ahead. I'll see if maybe I can somehow add a little Japan clock to the blog to make things easier. In the mean time, join us in our countdown to takeoff -- only 14 (almost 13) days left to go!

Welcome Back, Dear Readers!

Hello, everyone! We decided to make the switch from Vox to Blogspot so anyone can leave us a comment without having to create an account. I hope that will encourage you to comment more often while we're away.

This may be our second time in Japan, but rest assured we've got a few new adventures in the works this time around. So stay tuned to find out what they are! We'll be kicking things off February 5th, and we hope you'll keep checking back and checking in while we explore Japan in winter.

Better late than never

So, after a 4 1/2 month hiatus, I have finally returned to fill you all in on what we did that last month we were in Japan. Since we finally have high speed internet at home, it'll make it much easier to post all kinds of fun pictures for you to see. And I know the pictures are what you like the most (don't lie; you know it's true). Now, without further ado, let's get back to our vacation~

When we last left our heroes, we were in Kyoto, enjoying the festivities of the Gion Matsuri. With that little party over, the next day we decided to check out some of the historic sites, namely some of the temples, as well as a castle. We began the day relatively early and decided to first head up a lo~ng, steep hill to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, which means "pure water."

Even though it was early, it was already really hot out. Hot enough, even, to make Cinnamon break down and buy some "expensive" 130 yen water. ...Only to find 110 yen water at the next vending machine we passed. Oh well. But finally, we made it to the top of the hill!

That, obviously, is a 3-story pagoda just outside the temple itself. It's one of the first things you see when you're walking up to the temple grounds. The other thing you see is this:

You have to pass through this huge, bright vermilion gate to get to the temple itself. It looks pretty new, but that's just because they periodically repaint them. Still impressive, though.

Once we had paid our admission fee, we went up to the temple and checked out the building, as well as the spectacular view of the city below.

I guess it's a little hard to see here in the picture, but beyond the trees is the area around Kyoto Station. Almost in the middle of it is the (rather lackluster) Kyoto Tower, which is directly across from the station. Look at how high we climbed!

Right outside the main hall of the temple is a display with a ton of these "ema" wish boards. The idea is to buy (I think?) one of these boards, write a wish on it, and hang it up in the hopes that it will come true. It seems that most of the time, these wishes are anything from good health, to finding love, to being able to pass a big test in school. If you click on the picture to make it full sized, you can see that some of these wishes are even in English. However, neither Cinnamon nor I made one.

We walked away from the crowds a little to explore the rest of the area, and found a small shrine with a bunch of these little Jizo statues. Apparently, Jizo is the guardian of those who suffer, especially sick children and pregnant women (or so says my guidebook).

Here's the view of the temple from a little further away. You can see the main building on the right, and (obviously) the pagoda on the left. The temple itself is over 1,000 years old, and was built with no nails. How's that for excellent craftsmanship?

After taking a little walk around the woods, we came back and drank some holy water, just like these people are doing. You go through this line and grab one of these long-handled cups, catch some water, and drink it. When you're done, the cups go back into this little area, where they're sanitized by ultraviolet light. (You can sort of see it in the background there). The water was nice and cool and refreshing and comes straight from the mountain~

While walking back to the temple entrance, we spotted a geisha! Unfortunately, this was the best picture I could get of her, but it was interesting to see a little bit of "old" Japanese traditions mixed with the modernity of all the other temple patrons. She had some seriously high shoes on, too. I don't know how she managed to make it all the way up that hill!

After leaving the temple, we decided to get some lunch, and walked what felt like forever, until we finally made it to Coco's. Ahh~ familiar curry in a new city. I love that place. Once we had cooled down a bit and filled our tummies, it was back out into the 90-something degree heat and on to our next destination--Nijo Castle.

We took a train from Kyoto Station to Nijo, then proceeded to spend 15 minutes walking in the wrong direction before we finally found it. We came upon it on the wrong side and had to walk aaaaaaaall the way around the outside of the walls to get to the entrance. And it was a very long walk. With only about half an hour to spare until closing time, we hurried and paid our admission, took off our shoes, and toured the castle.

This is the castle with the famed nightingale floors, which kind of squeak and make sort of a chirping sound when you walk on them, to guard against possible intruders. Unlike some other castles in Japan, this one is all one story, and very long and winding. But they don't allow photography inside, so all we have are pictures from outside.

Here's one of the castle gates... pretty obvious. Naturally, the bridge goes over the moat.

The walls of the interior grounds are built with a "fan" shape, which purportedly makes them harder to climb. Cinnamon and I aren't buying that. They don't look so impenetrable to me.

Cinnamon took a bunch of pictures of the castle grounds and this very garden... but apparently set her camera mode to black and white unknowingly. So here's one of the few color pictures she took.

We climbed up one of the lookouts and snapped this fantastic shot of the castle. The sky looks incredibly blue here! And it was nice because you could really feel the breeze from the higher perch--a very nice, if still warm, change from the stifling 100 degree heat that day.

Before we had even finished making the loop around the castle grounds, the castle had closed and it was time to leave. So we went back to the hostel to chill out in the air conditioning. Of course, we first made a pit stop at the conbini for some ice cream, and Cinnamon discovered the joys of a little thing called a Coolish. Unfortunately, I didn't get to try one until the next day.

Basically, a Coolish is... like a milkshake in a Capri Sun-like pouch. They come pretty frozen, so by the time you thaw it out enough to drink it, you're feeling much cooler. Oh man, I miss those so much. Here's a quick little commercial for them:

Once we had sufficiently chilled, we decided to check out Fushimi Shrine, with its 4km path of torii gates. I had heard it's supposed to be pretty creepy at night, so this seemed like a great idea. And off we went!

Here we are (a rare full shot!) standing in front of the shrine. We chatted a little bit with a taxi driver who was there, and he was kind enough to take this picture for us. Don't we look happy~ (And me with my dorky tennis shoes, hahaha.)

There were a few of these dog statues around, and we don't know what they were for, but Cinnamon said they looked evil. ...So she made me take pictures of them.

Check it out, in all its bibbed, evil glory.

And here's the start of all the numerous torii gates. We made it through one little row of them, and it started sprinkling, and there was thunder and lightning. After taking shelter under a little canopy until the rain stopped, we started to head back toward the next path with bigger torii. ...Except there were spiders. Lots of spiders (a little bigger than a half dollar) that looked sort of like crabs. They were all over the torii and were really creeping us out, so we did what any logical person would've done... and turned around and left.

We decided we'd come back in the morning before leaving the city, so we headed home and somehow managed to NOT get caught in the rain (too badly). But that, my friends, is a story for another day~