Onto Kyoto

Last night I played darts with some Japanese businessmen in an american style bar. Only in Tokyo.

Well I'm about to leave for Kyoto at 10:30 tonight from shinjuku and we will get there at about 6:30 tomorrow morning. It should be exciting to say the least. Every Japanese person I know keeps on telling me I am lucky to be visiting in fall because it is the most beautiful season to see Kyoto.

We'll be returning next thursday morning at 6:30. If you get stalkerish and want to see me slash know where I am. Thisis the website of our hostel we'll be at. Stay safe.

No longer Juan

I'm now a legal member of the working force. I went back to the immigration office today and got my work visa. It only took like 10 minutes today though. So no big wait like last time. Atilla needed to change his visa to a multiple entry visa so he went with me. He also didn't take that long so we decided to go to Daiba since we were nearby. (so we thought). Daiba(台場), literally machine place, was originally a huge concrete slab made into an island for putting guns on during WWII. Hence the name. Now it's a strange fake island of pure fakeness. No one actually lives on the island but there are tons of shops and amusement places there.

Anyway so after taking a taxi we got there. My second time in a Japanese taxi and this time I was the one who knew the most Japanese so I am surprised I didn't get us lost. The driver just looked at me when I was trying to tell him where I wanted to go, so I finally just said "Daiba", and he understood that. Arg my lack of Japanese. We ended up going to this toyota motor show and looking at concept cars and taking a ride in an electric car. It was really funny because I think we were the sole foreigners on the entire island that day.


This is Atilla "driving" the car. The car was on a magnetic track and was driving itself.


Here is me being a good Japanese passenger.


The sign reminding us about seatbelts. Pretty important because this speed demon went 15 km/h once.

After the motor show we went onto the amusement part of the place. There was a huge ferris wheel there that claimed to be the largest ferris wheel in the world. It was 150 metres at the top. We chose to get in the transparent car so it seemed even higher up to me. Thankfully it was a really clear day so you could so really far. You could see mount fuji even.

This is taking way too long with the pictures. Maybe tomorrow the internet will be faster and I'll put more up. I got some good ones from the ferris wheel.

So we took the monorail back to inner Tokyo and went onto uni after that. It was a good view from the monorail so good times. After classes today I went with Rachel to the bible study for the college group at Tokyo baptist. They did not have any english books of the lessons so I used the Japanese version and actually understood quite a lot of it. Exciting.

Monday Madness

Yesterday I went with Daniel to get information for our business project. Basically we have to compare 3 homemade items around Tokyo with something made in a department store. Apparently this man is from another part of Japan that isn't massively commercial. Because it's really hard to find "mom and pop" stores like he had asked us to. Even stores that look like they could be are normally chain stores. But I ended up lucking out and found some gyoza makers. Gyoza are chinese dumpling sort of things. Sort of like what you would put in an egg roll but in a dumpling, and are normally grilled.

Then last night I went back to Tokyo Baptist for their worship/concert. It was good I think. I'm not too sure, it was really charasmatic and mind you Pastor Jim told us clapping was a sin. I mean charasmatic as in, as the pastor told us, "ya'll just need to get down with your black self". Not charasmatic as in crazies speaking tounges and "healing" people then taking your money. It was all very interesting thought because the church is really from all over. There are lots of Filipino people and many western people among the Japanese people. Kind of neat to see all those people together in one place.

This morning I had my russian class. Today she told me about her opinion about the mass marketing of American products to former soviet republics after perestroika. All in russian and japanese. One of those "where am I?" moments.

I've been looking up a lot of info for my trip to Kyoto next week. It's going to be pretty exciting. Our hostel is right in the centre of town and I've gotten some information about some cool places to go and how to save money on transport. Apparently fall is the best season to go to Kyoto because of the leaves turning. They are turning in Tokyo as well I think but there are like 3 trees for the 20 million of us. If you happen across some must-sees or do's in Kyoto, share the wealth.