China town, Yokohama

8th December 2011

Today Ben and I went to China town in Yokohama and had a wander around. Went to a ramen place for lunch and had a huge bowl of ramen with gyoza and nikuman, didn't quite realise how much food I ordered, the portions were huge, found a home for it all though. :)

Found this awesome festive buzz lightyear in one of the shops, and a bill changer with some great engrish lit up on the display.

Honda Asimo at the museum of emerging science

7th December 2011

Today we went to the museum of emerging science. Saw some pretty neat stuff including a replica of the living quarters from a space station, a submarine they use to analyse fault lines under the sea and the Honda Asimo robot.

The picture to the right is the toilet from the space station living quarters.. looks pretty barbaric!

The Shinkai submarine is designed for 3 people. Here are my friends demonstrating that its clearly not designed around western people!

Afterwards we went to Shinjuku to look around and have some dinner which proved to be very expensive! Saw this crazy rabbit mannequin in the window of shop there.. weird.

Ueno zoo

6th December 2011

Hung out with a load of guys from the hostel today and we went to Ueno zoo.

Loving the panda post box just outside the zoo.

Saw some excellent signs at the zoo. The first one seems to suggest you should put your fingers into the mouth of the bitey animal.. and the second one tells you not to push red crosses in the mouth of the bitey animal.

This was my favourite sign, quickly drawn up and stuck near the hippos area.

Genius

Saw this in the toilet at the hostel. I wonder how well it would do on dragon's den? I'm sure there is a market for it. Everyone has been there (yes you have), trying to wrestle one away..

This prototype is obviously just a repurposed shoe horn but I'm sure they're working on a great design for the real thing.

A day in Yokohama

4th December 2011

Met Ben and his wife Junko and went to Yokohama for the day. Explored some more huge electronics stores, saw the new Sony Vita which looks pretty nice, hard to get a go on it though due to the hoards of people stood around waiting.

There are capsule toy machines everywhere in Japan. Japanese people seem to be crazy for them. You see them outside stores, in the streets, and some department stores have dedicated areas for them..

So far I've seen a lot of large models or statues of famous characters from games, anime, etc.. Some of the ones I saw today include a gundam and Snake, from the metal gear solid games in the entrance to a huge store. Ace.

After lunch we went to the Nissan gallery where they have a load of Nissan concept cars and the new GTR, which I sat in but was sad to find there was no key in the ignition. :(


We went to the Yokohama landmark tower to see a great view of Yokohama and Tokyo, its one of the tallest buildings in Japan - you can also see mount Fuji from there. You can go up to the observatory on the 69th floor in a lift that does 45km per hour! It costs 1000 yen but you get up there in about 20 seconds. It was great timing for us to get there as we saw the view in good light and hung about for the sunset which was amazing.

When we came down we picked up some takoyaki and walked around Yokohama and saw the ferris wheel and xmas market and then went to Junko's place to have dinner before I went back to the hostel in Nishikawaguchi.


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Indonesia GPS track

Forgot to put this up earlier. My route around Indonesia.


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I'll meet you at the Hachiko statue..

3rd December 2011

At lunch time I went to meet my friend Ben who moved to Japan about 8 months ago to work. We had arranged to meet at Shibuya by the Hachiko statue (Hachiko is a famous dog in Japan) near the train station. When I got to Shibuya station I went to the Hachiko exit and tried to find the statue. I had no idea what the statue was like but I was looking for something big and I had conjured this image of a crazy looking cartoon dog statue in my mind.. I walked around the area, asked a few people, found it on a map at the station and still could not see it. I was 40 minutes late to meet Ben when I asked one of the train station staff who pointed out the tiny life size dog statue immediately opposite the train station exit which I had walked around in circles! A mobile phone would have been handy.

Shibuya is super busy so we went through Yoyogi park and made our way to Akihabara, the electric town.. or geek central if you prefer. In Akihabara we went into a few huge electronics department stores like yodobashi camera and some gaming stores before we stopped for a Japanese curry.

Later we went to a couple of huge arcades, Taito Station and Club Sega. Both have 5 floors of arcade games which kept us busy for a while. The first floor tends to be full of UFO catchers (which are ridiculously popular here), then you go up the escalators to find all the games. Its mad how busy they are, in England you're lucky to find an arcade at all, let alone a good one!