06/03/11 - Friday

We woke up late (around 11am) exhausted from the previous day. It finally stopped raining and there were several morning earthquakes. Unfortunately for us, check-out time was 10am so we had to pay for the extra hour (worth it). We gathered our luggage and tried to find our way back to the car. We got turned around several times, but eventually we found it (note of interest: the hundreds of identical cars had all disappeared!) We did get to enjoy some pretty fancy architecture though (note size of buildings compared to size of people!):

We then drove to Tokyo's Shinjuku district to find our next hotel: Shinjuku Park Hotel. We saw some sights on the way.

Drove around the gardens of the Emperor's Palace:

Saw a 4-door Mazda RX-8 (trust me, it's weird):

Saw some scary building which I think was a police station (note its massiveness):

By the way, these are what traffic lights look like in Japan (what would you do here?):

Saw policemen transporting prisoners:

The buildings changing between Ginza district and Shinjuku district were pretty obvious. Here we are arriving in Shinjuku:

We also arrived at our hotel, and they gave us a room but check-in wasn't until 3pm, and it was only 1pm. So we gathered our essential items, left our luggage at the hotel, and parked the car at the hotel. They only allowed us to do that for one day, and we planned to stay for 2, so they gave us a pass to park across the street. In the meantime, they let us drive the Every onto a spinner which turned the car around for us!

We parked (aw how cute). See the wall above the van? The attendant wanted our front end to meet the edge exactly. Michael had pulled a bit forward, so he undid the parking brake and pushed it into place. This blew the attendant's MIND!

Like I said, we had some time so we explored Shinjuku a little bit. We rounded the corner and saw a motorcycle with a windshield and a roof:

Also note that that is an alleyway. See how perfectly clean it is in a humungo city? I love Japan. We also ate at McDonald's to see what it was like. 1) It was still gross 2) it was slightly higher quality than USA's food 3) it was very clean and fast (they apologized that my burger would take 3 minutes), 4) that scene in Pulp Fiction where they say that the French call a quarter pounder with cheese a Royale with cheese because they use the metric system, is totally not valid:

We also came across this store:

See that turquoise backpack on the right? That's mine, baby. All mine. Best purchase ever since my shoulder bag had deteriorated and all the zippers had broken. See that gigantic zipper down the middle? So satisfying AND functional.

We also found Shinjuku station and walked around the terminal tunnels for a while (sure to be a shock to fellow Americans, walking around a terminal in Japan is a pretty pleasant thing to do). Also came across this shop:

This was a handweaving shop. The lady who owned the place showed us around a little and spoke pretty good English. She asked a lot of questions like where we were from, how long we're staying, why we were here, and she gave us an English flyer explaining the place. Apparently her mom, who is turning 98 soon, invented the Saori handweaving technique which embraces the 'perfection of every mistake.' They offer all sorts of programs for mentally and physically disabled people and there was a young man with down syndrom hand winding balls of yarn. I bought about 90g for my mom. There were ladies there learning to weave on looms:

And creating art:

Down the street was an arcade where we played many games like a Mario Kart 2 racing game, Initial D racing game, and this drum game:

Did I mention the toilet paper had cartoons on it?

Soon it was 3pm so we headed back towards the hotel and found it right away. They had given us their last available room:

It was awesome. We watched some hypnotizing Japanese children's shows and then went to look for a Citibank... cash wasn't super low, but we thought was a good idea. Our guidebook had mentioned that they usually had 24 hour ATMs which worked with foreign cards. We looked and meandered for a long time. We saw some cool bits of town:

But after a while, we gave up. We rounded a corner, and found a Citibank! Along the way we had tried quite a few different types of ATMs, but none of them worked. At the Citibank, Michael's card worked, but not Billy's or mine. Oh well. We got hungry so walked into a nearby sushi place.

The customers sat around the sushi chefs who were surrounded by a conveyor belt. The chefs handmade the sushi and put it on a plate on the conveyor belt:

You then grabbed whatever plates you wanted and stacked the empty plates. When you're full, you tell the guy at the register and he counts your plates and charges you based on the color of the plates you ate. We spent about $30 each and got so full on the best sushi I've ever had. Look at all the exotic kinds up there!

After our fill we wandered around and looked for another arcade. We ended up playing around with some gambling games (like a mini fake horse race thing we couldn't quite figure out), played a Guitar Hero type game and Terminator shooting game. In the areas where there were musical skill games, everyone around us were getting all 100%s on everything. When we walked out of the arcade we entered into Shinjuku night life on a Friday:

There were thousands of really well dressed young hip people everywhere. I usually have a fear of crowds, but Japan is different. The crowd works with each other and everyone is very relaxed. I didn't have a single panicky moment.

We went into the biggest electronics store in Japan, Bic Camera, which had 9 floors (though each one was pretty small). After looking around we left and just let ourselves walk around with the huge crowds of people and eventually started looking for a movie theater. We found one on the 9th story of a building right by our hotel. We saw the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 3D (it was in English with Japanese subtitles). From the previews to the end of the credits, everyone sat completely silently and still. I swear the girl who sat next to me didn't even move her arm. The lights didn't come on until the very end of the credits. According to Mike's experience, it's not uncommon for them to be silent the whole movie, and then if you talk to them later they say "Yeah, that movie was really funny!", but the being still and silent through the credits was a bit more intense than he's seen. People got up and took their trash with them (except for me, silly Gai-Jin).

We had gone up to the theater by escalators that went through a mall, but the movie ended around 11:30pm and the mall was closed, so everyone had to pile into 2 elevators. In line, Billy was ahead of Michael and Marika, and his elevator had gotten so packed that Michael and Marika had to get in a different one! We walked back to the hotel, watched Inglourious Basterds (which was in English/French/German with Japanese subtitles), and fell asleep partway through.

06/02/11 - Thursday

We woke up and looked out our little balcony:

We went out and started walking around Aizu-Wakamatsu in search of breakfast and somewhere where we could get a GPS (we had one, but it was very difficult to use), but everywhere was closed. Interesting fact about Japan: they start late. Stores don't really open until after 10am. We found a Super Autobacs (they had one in Misawa but we were unsuccessful in finding a GPS), but it was also closed.

While we walked back to the hotel to get the car we found a scooter that had been abandoned for so long, nature was claiming it:

Passageways for pedestrians that went underneath the road (we found them to be much more common in the bigger cities):

A close-up of a shrine (we saw these things everywhere, country or city):

And somewhere open for breakfast (I suppose I should note that during check-in the previous night, they gave us little cards that we could use to get breakfast at the hotel, but we had lost them (they would show up in our bags several days later)):

Before you get too excited, Denny's in Japan is not the same as Denny's in the states. For instance, their condiments:

The pink thing is a sugar packet. The bottle all the way on the left: soy sauce, the 'Restaurant Sauce': is 'bulldog' sauce which is like soy sauce but tastes slightly different. The food is also different (it should be noted that it is not popular in Japan to 'go out' to breakfast, they eat that more at home, also smoking inside is OK):

After eating, we decided to try to find one of the main attractions of Aizu-Wakamatsu: Tsurugajo Castle. We ended up circling around for quite a bit, but when we found it we couldn't believe it took us so long as it was right in the middle of the town and it was big! We found parking immediately and were proud to be the oldest car in the parking lot. Here's the map of the grounds:

There was an outer moat:

and an inner moat:

With the biggest fish ever known to man. We walked down that red bridge:

There were several shinto shrines on the grounds.

By the way, all those colorful rainbows? Thousands of origami cranes:

The castle:

The Samurai out front naively gave me a weapon (I had to give it back):

There must not have been a lot of tourists there as we got pointed at (often accompanied with big smiles), stared at, and greeted with a big "Helloooooo!" by a group of Japanese school girls (about 13 - 14 years old).

The legend of Tsurugajo Castle is that there was a big battle in 1634 at the grounds of the castle. A group of teenage Samurai warriors saw the castle from the distance, saw the fires, believed the castle to be on fire, and all of them committed seppuku (suicide by disembowlment (yikes)). In reality, the grounds around the castle were on fire, but not the castle itself. The act of the Samurai caused the battle to be lost within a couple weeks.

The castle itself was renovated in the 1880s, and the inside was a museum. They didn't allow pictures on most of the floors, but each floor (I think there were about 7 floors) offered different historical artifacts such as Samurai masks, swords, rifles, and ancient crafts like theses hand painted candles:

Of course, everything was in Japanese, but we got quite a bit out of the (unguided) tour. Especially the views from the top:

The bottom picture was taken with my camera zoomed as far in as it would possible go - that statue was barely a blip!

Our tickets (which were 500 yen each) also allowed us to go into the Chasitsu Rinkaku tea house on the grounds. Apparently one of the leaders who lived in the castle was a tea master and had the whole thing built.

We saw an interesting monolithic tombstone which looked like it had handcarved kanji in the surface:

Finally we decided we needed to hit the road again, and took the Ban-etsu Expressway towards Tokyo (which went through Bandai and Sendai) at around 1:10pm. Look who we ended up driving past (sorry for the crap picture - it was beginning to rain again. Turned out that whenever we hit the road, it would start raining, and whenever we woke up at our destination, it would be sunny)!

On our way to Tokyo, my camera started dying and in a frantic sort of frenzy, this is the last picture it would take until the next day:

There were two tunnels next to each other, and there were two swans facing each other.

We arrived in Tokyo on crazy high-rise freeways. The drivers were more aggressive than the country folk, and the freeway views were blocked on both sides by walls that went up and curved towards each other at the top. We could only see the very tops of sky scrapers, some rivers, and some unhelpful signs in kanji. I now understand the video game F-Zero as that is exactly what their freeways are like.

It was dark and raining and we still needed to find parking and a hotel. We ended up in the Ginza district of Tokyo, which is also the 'business' district (business as in offices). The first garage we tried was across the street from the Emperor's Palace. After much fumbling communication with the attendant there, it was clear we weren't allowed to park there, so we turned around and ended up finding a spot in the 4th floor of a basement (so, technically the -4th floor) underneath a department store.

We left our luggage in the car and walked towards JNTO (Tourist Information as guided by our book), but they had closed 15 minutes before we got there (around 5pm). We grabbed some brochures, went up several floors of the building, had dinner surrounded by business-people enjoying the end of the work day (yes we were dishevelled gai-jin (foreigners), and may have stood out). We then walked out of the building, under some train tracks, bought umbrellas at a nearby convenience store, and walked around Ginza looking for a hotel.

We came across a 4 Seaons, but rooms were around 70,000 yen a night (about $900!). The front ladies were very helpful and very surprised and confused about our road trip idea (not too common a concept in Japan, I guess). They gave us a map of the local area and circled some reasonably priced hotels we should try.

We navigated the city using the map, brochures, and public maps on the street corners and somehow found our way back to the car. We drove around the Emperor's Palace, exploring the area a bit, gave up on the GPS showing where hotels were in the area (it had "H"s, but it was still very unhelpful) and went to Northern Ginza by the Nihonbashi Station and parked in a basement lot. There must have been hundreds of identical looking black cars with a specific decal on the side, but we asked a man washing them if it was ok for us to be there and he gave his assurance that it was, so we parked. We gathered our luggage and began walking around Ginza looking for Yaezu Terminal Hotel.

We wandered the streets for hours with all our luggage in the rain. The alleys were narrow and packed, but we were so tired and stressed it didn't matter since we were able to just be in awe of the bar scenes around us in downtown Tokyo. We finally found it around 10pm and we passed the heck out.

By the way, here is our hotel room:

Billy is sitting on his cot that they arranged in the room so 3 people could sleep... and here is our bathroom: