06/06/11 - Monday

We woke up late the next morning at around 10am by a phone call telling us it was check-out time. I woke up with a sore throat that had been building the last couple of days, with the added symptom of being thoroughly exhausted. The room was somehow trashed already and we rushed and packed all our bags, dropped off our keys, and left. As we pulled out into the main street we saw....!

Yes, that would be Mt. Fuji right by our hotel - totally invisible the day before. It was large and in charge but as soon as we left the main road we wouldn't see it again (until days later on a train). We hit the road aiming towards the nearest Shinkansen (bullet train) station, planning to drop off the car for the next 7 days. Here's what the views offered:

After 30 minutes we arrived in Mishima and looked for (cheap) parking. After circling around the small town a bit, we parked at a hotel that had no price signs and went inside to ask how much it cost. We learned that it would cost us about 300 yen an hour. 300 yen = 3.71 over 7 days = nearly $700! So we asked the front lady if they knew of a place nearby that offered cheap parking. In America you might get an answer like, "Sure, if you go out and take a right and a left blah blah blah." In Japan?

At once it was a flurry of activity. I lost count of how many hotel clerks were rushing to find us cheap parking: two were on the phone with someone else, one was searching through thick binders, one was talking to someone else in the next room, and one was going over a map with us. The woman going over the map with us spoke really good English and had a really good American accent. She told us the cheapest area, where it was, and how much it was. There were two lots, one that could cost 10,000 yen for the week, but she called them and would let us use the other lot which was only 7,000 yen for the week...

...I'll give you a minute to pause here to let that really sink in... I mean, it was even obvious we weren't going to stay at that hotel but still... whew. OK let's move on.

So we thanked them and drove to the lot. The 3 guys working there knew very very little English but somehow we communicated about the woman at the hotel who had called them, let them know we were planning to get the car back on the 11th or 12th, and paid the 7,000 yen. We gathered our luggage and a guy drove Mike with the van to a nearby lot, gave Mike the key (we could come pick it up whenever we were ready to leave), and we walked the short distance to Mishima station.

We got 3 tickets for the bullet train to Kyoto and waited for an hour, ate a snack in the little wait room area, and watched the train pull in!

The train ride was about 2 hours and looked like this!

We arrived in famous and beautiful Kyoto Station!

We walked to our new hotel which, whoops. Not a hotel.

Important word: Hostel. So our room looked like this (note identical looks of disbelief):

By the way, yes that is a bunk bed on the right, and that is literally everything in the whole room. There was a communal bathroom, living room, and kitchen elsewhere in the building. In the bathroom, the boys and girls went in the same room but there were stalls... that night and the next morning there was a girl in the common bathroom standing around in her underwear that said hello to me... odd. Even for gai-jin it was odd. We decided to only spend one night there. Good news though - it was super cheap! As a side note, for a hostel, it was very clean, hip, and nice. We were expecting a hotel, though, so oh well.

We left our luggage and walked back to Kyoto Station and walked on the sky-walk. Super amazing architecture.

We started exploring this area, but apparently it was a part of a very fancy hotel. We got approached by a very professional Japanese woman who asked us to leave (yes we have been kicked out/asked to leave out of somewhere in every city we've been to! Gai-Jin styling!) so we went further up the sky-walk.

We ate at a very hip restaurant at the top level which had great views and blueberry whiskey which was extremely delicious (I had a calpis whiskey... calpis is a sweet drink that sort looks like watery milk that I really enjoy, and not just because of the name).

We walked across the street to Kyoto Tower (the white building in the above picture) and checked out the binocular views from the top (it was night time at this point).

We bought some souvenirs and wend to a nearby department store (one of the only buildings that was staying open past 9pm), bought toys (yes, we did this a lot), and explored the mall.

We felt like staying out drinking (mostly to avoid going back to our hostel) so we went to a bar that was attached to the hostel building.

Yes, Mike is drinking a Corona.. but it was still a little different:

The drinks were pretty good, but there were a lot of tourists and English speakers (I know! So lame!) so we left and went to this place:

We opened the door and walked in, there were 4 people nearly packing the place. They were all older (some would say salty) Japanese people, with a tough Japanese lady bartender, a very old man on the right singing slow Japanese songs on a karaoke machine, and to the left was an ancient Japanese woman smoking, and another man (the youngest in his high 40s). They all shifted so we could fit at the bar. The old man singing karaoke bought us all a beer and we sat down. The bartender urged to each sing songs that we could choose from a big book. We sang American songs like Green Day (Michael), Red Hot Chili Peppers (Marika and Billy duet). Then Michael sang, by himself, 'In the Navy' by The Village People and Billy nearly fell off his stool with laughter. No one in the bar spoke any English (well, the bartender spoke a few words), but we tried conversation anyway. After our beer we thanked everyone and left (a note here, the ancient lady and the bartender would re-fill our glasses with our bottles of beer any time we would hesitate). Tipsy, we went back to the hostel, played gin and cars, then slept.

Thus marks my first (and probably last - who could top it??) karaoke experience!

06/05/11 - Sunday

We checked out of our hotel and hit the road again towards Atsugi Naval base with the hopes that they would let Mike park his van there for free for a week (we were planning to take the train to Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, then back).

By the way, here's a better sort of image of Tokyo's freeways (the calmer bits) with a newer Suzuki Every ahead (in white)!

We saw Japanese graffiti in English:

A new Renault Cleo Sport Turbo V6 - the most recent of the R5 Turbo lineage and more fun traffic lights:

At last we found the base!

We walked into the door to get passes/etc. and there was a long line. After waiting a while, we got up to the single guy working. Once he found out Mike was from Misawa's base he got really frustrated and said something like since it's the weekend he's not allowed to process us so we have to wait until everyone in line behind us has been helped, then he could talk to us. The line had been growing since we got there and was now out the door, so we decided to leave.

We were hungry so we walked around a bit. We found 'Mike's Mexican Food' (which they also had in Misawa) (note the plasticized food out front - just about every restaurant had it... I have no idea how they did that!):

But it was closed for an hour, beginning from 5 minutes before we got there. There were people inside but they told us to leave (gai-jin telling us to get out now! What is the world coming to?)

We went across the street into a Pachinko place but the sound was absolutely deafening and it was very smokey inside, plus nowhere to eat.

We decided to go back to the car. There was a drink vending machine next to it, so we went to buy something to drink - but it was broken. Literally the only broken vending machine of hundreds that we've seen. We decided to leave freakin Atsugi.

On the road again, we saw a new Volkswagen Scirocco - one of the very rare sightings of a German car in Japan AND it's not offered in the states!

We ate at a Bob's Big Boy (simply named "Big Boy") in Yokohama, and the pressure was put on ME to come up with a new plan. So I took the boys, via winding sharp turning mountain roads, towards Fuji-Yoshida. I did this for 2 reasons: 1) we would be within 10k of Mt. Fuji, which is cool 2) there's a small bullet train station within a half hour of it called Mishima, which would probably have parking.

Seemingly unrelated back-story:

Way back when we were leaving Misawa, before we got to Aizu-Wakamatsu, Mike casually mentioned something about how Misawa has this drink that is like a 'pancake juice'. It comes in a can and tastes just like pancakes. Billy and I were intrigued, and throughout the entire trip we had gotten pretty good into the habit of scanning every drink vending machine we came across (easily hundreds) for the elusive Pancake Juice, and still had yet to see any.

The winding mountain roads offered these views:

While we were driving among these roads, we were driving through a very small town. There was a vending machine on the edge of the road, perpendicular to it, that was probably the only vending machine in town. As we pass it going at least 30mph, probably closer to 45, I shout "THAT ONE HAD A PANCAKE JUICE!" and Mike immediately turned the car around. Sure enough:

We tasted victory that day, my friends. It tasted just like pancakes and syrup. It was served cold and it was extremely rich and sweet. (We had it again when we arrived back in Misawa, but served hot. Much better.) Interesting fact about Japan: In those vending machines, many different kinds of drinks are sold cold or hot (you can tell by the color around the price - see how it is blue around 100? That means it's cold. Red = hot). In order to keep the cans from expanding or contracting from the temperature changes, they have insulation. The result is an aluminum can that is almost impossible to crush by hand.

We arrived at our next hotel in Fuji-Yoshida around dusk, the Tabijiya. We found it 5 minutes after arriving in Fuji-Yoshida and they immediately had rooms available. Yay!

Let me say, at this point in the journey, I am flummoxed. Here we are in Fuji-Yoshida. A town that used to provide travelers with their last pit-stop before climbing Mt. Fuji, a town that is literally 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the base of the mountain.. and it is barely overcast.. and we could not see where the thing was. We literally could not see a mountain. Here is some not Mt. Fuji:

And Billy and Marika's room (more comfortable than it looks):

We went behind the hotel to a general store and bought laundry stuff (note: it's interesting how hard it is to tell what laundry stuff is compared to, say, dishwasher stuff, when you can't read the writing (no there wasn't an accident)), toys, and I bought some seeds to plant at home.

We got laundry started at the hotel. Billy tried to buy a TV-Card like in the other hotel, but we couldn't figure out where to put it... Billy asked the owner at the lobby and he said our room didn't have that service, so he gave us back our money out of his pocket (1,000 yen).

I taught the boys gin rummy (Billy had bought a manga magazine at the general store - when he opened it, it happened to have a deck of cards in it!) and we played with our toy cars and watched regular TV. Mike went to his own room and Billy and I stayed up waiting for the laundry to dry (it took a long time).

06/04/11 - Saturday

We woke up around 9am, took showers and got dressed. We were able to check our e-mail and Facebook stuff from our iPads in the lobby. We walked around and found a post office where we were able to pull out 20,000¥. We re-parked the van across the street and walked around Shinjuku. I swear it looked almost cartoony sometimes:

We decided to buy all-day rail passes and used them to check out the different districts of Tokyo. First stop: Shibuya:

We walked the famous Shibuya crossing with the television screens in the buildings (which were difficult to capture with the camera).

We walked around the station and tried to find the statue of Hachiko. When we found it there was a very friendly Japanese guy with a megaphone who loved me and Michael and thought we were Dutch (not sure why he wasn't too keen on Billy, sorry Billy):

Everyone loooved Michael's shirt which said "Coca-Cola, sweet and refreshing" (or something like that) and they called him "Mr. Coca-Cola".

The story of Hachiko is, in 1924, a professor got Hachiko as his pet dog. The professor took the train to Shibuya after work every day, and Hachiko greeted him there and they walked home. They did the same thing every work day until 1925, when the professor had a hemorrhage on the train and didn't arrive in Shibuya. Of course, no one could tell the dog, so every day for the next 9 years Hachiko would wait for his owner at the train station (even when others tried to adopt him, he would escape and wait at the station). He would show up every day when his owner's train would be arriving and the station employees and commuters provided him with food and water while he waited, until he died. They built the statue to represent his undying loyalty.

We went to the station's mall and ate lunch went to a Cold Stone (I had green tea ice cream). They're are less focused on giving massive amounts of ice cream, and more on singing a song for each patron as they made it (very cute)! Interesting fact about Japan: They don't walk around with their drinks or food. Everyone sat down to eat their cones/cups and then got up and left. Good luck finding a trash can if you're walking around!

We wandered around for a little bit, then took the train to our next stop: Ahikabara district, famous for its electronics and cosplay (costumes).

We were pretty disappointed. We found out later, we went to the wrong areas at the wrong time of day. We hardly saw anybody in costumes and the way the electronic stores were set-up felt like a big swap-meet. They also had erotic anime statues and figurines which came off as skeezy instead of the usual interesting (I think this had to do with the fact that there were a lot of gai-jin looking at them not quite innocently, and the sheer number of the figures). We played around in an arcade but we were getting unhappy, hot, and tired, so we decided to move on to our next location: Ueno.

We walked from the station to Ueno Park (it was kitty corner from it). We saw the Shogitai Warrior Tomb:

and the Kiyomizu Kanno-Do buddhist temple. In front of the bigger temples we saw, there were places to wash your hands before you entered:

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but I did get the roof (I didn't get a good shot of the whole building though - at any rate we didn't spend a huge amount of time there):

We walked in the park and away from the temple, towards the Shitamachi Museum . Leading up to the museum were street vendors selling their wares.

Past the vendors, the road turned into a bridge and on either side were fields of lotus flowers (not in bloom).

As we got closer to the museum building, there were hundreds of giant carp (about a foot to a foot and half in length each) who were schooling coming out of the water, skimming the surface of some sort of pipe with their bellies, and going back into the water. They were pretty hypnotizing!

As we got to the museum building, which looked like this (but we didn't go inside):

There were some artifacts outside, such as this old shrine:

And a rock with handcarved kanji in it:

Here's what Billy's seeing:

Around the back of the museum there was Shinobazu Pond. There were many romantic Japanese people that day, renting paddle boats.

We took a relaxing stroll around the pond...

I think it will mean more if I just let the pictures show you our walk around the park...

We then walked back to Ueno station and took the long-way train ride back to Shinjuku. Our train (no, not the bullet train... yet):

Ride to Shinjuku:

We got there as the sun was setting, and we decided to check out the 13 floors of the nearby Takashinoya department store. We bought some toy cars, saw cool figures...

and the possibility to buy deep-water fish in a tube:

Then we decided to go out to dinner. We decided to go into the first hole-in-the-wall place we found, which was down some narrow stairs, but we got turned away (we started to get used to this, apparently... freakin Gai-jin not knowin when they're not invited..) We walked across the alleyway to this place (no, I don't know what it was called):

When we walked in we were pretty sure they wouldn't be able to speak English, but we were wrong. There was a tough middle-aged Japanese lady who spoke very broken, but fast, English and brought us a menu all in kanji. She brought us beer and a menu with pictures on it, we pointed to some different looking items. Turns out that they would bring the 3 - 4 dishes we ordered one at a time for us all to share, and bring out the next when we were all done with one.

The first thing we got was something like boiled vegetables..? It was gross and the boys started turning on me for choosing this place. However, the next few dishes (unfortunately my notes have failed me here...) were all very good. I do remember that one of the dishes were some sort of shish-kabob with different types of meat on each... there were about 8 between all of us and one of them had all liver, one had all cartilidge..? something? At any rate, we cleaned up.

We left the restaurant, left our thanks, and went to a nearby arcade. We played the drum game again, I beat Tetris, played some sort of game like 1945 (flying a plane over land while shooting), and Virtua Fighter 5 Showdown, then walked to Lawson's convenience store (a sort of 7-11 (they had 7-11s too)), bought ice cream, drinks, chips, and back to the hotel.

We watched English-with-Japanese-subtitles Iron Man 2 and Green Zone with Matt Damon. Geez Green Zone was a terrible movie.

P.S. If it seems like we did a helluva lot of walking in Japan, it's because we did a helluva lot of walking in Japan.