Ok, finally I have some time to write some stuff.
It’s 2am now, and I am a bit tired, but I am sitting here in a manga cafe and uploading pictures. Nisse just fell asleep in his chair. We payed 980 yen to stay here until 8am, but we still have our hostel room waiting for us. I think we’ll go there after we’re done here.
In any event, I shall try to summarize some of the stuff that we’ve been doing here.
We arrived early on Sunday morning, took the Keisei line to Ueno and met with Sayaka (the O. Sayaka). For me the experience was less overwhelming then for Nisse, but still, being in Japan was certainly exciting.
After wandering around a bit, we ate some ramen and then went to rent a car so we could go to Nikko. Sayaka had suggested this a while ago, however neither she nor we had any sort of idea as to accomodations and such things. We figured we’d get a local guidebook there, and so we drove off.
Well in Nikko, we realised that the book store was closed. We also realised that the guides sold in 7 Eleven were not so good. However, some gaijin magick soon resolved the situation. The dude on the photo directed us to a hotel and even hooked us up with a nice discount!
The hotel was great, if a bit too modern for my taste. Food was damn nice and the bath was very relaxing. We concluded the evening with a nice walk around the area and soon after we were fast asleep after our somewhat exhausting trip.
At this point I had slept about 10 hours on separate occasions in the last 48 hours.
The next day we visited some touristy temples and a waterfall. I also got to drive on some seriously kick ass curvy japanese mountain roads. The tires were screeching even though I was taking those curves at only 40km/h. High quality entertainment.
After arriving back to Tokyo, I got to once again experience Tokyo traffic. I think it compares closest to driving in New York. In other words, not too bad. Italy was much worse.
We booked ourselves into Taito Ryokan, a popular hostel for foreigners (quite a run down place) and then took a long walk around Asakusa, before turning in for the night.
The next day was basically spent in Akihabara. I am sorry to say that I am no longer happy with that place. I bought some cheap CF memory, which died on me after 10 pictures (although it works again after formatting…. grr). I also bought a 120gb 2.5″ HD and a portable hd case with a memory card reader so I could upload pics from my CF card to the harddrive when it got filled up. The first one I got was totally Dead On Arrival. The second one worked, but only for a few hours, then it died. Luckily it seems that the harddrive with 590 pictures that I have taken over the last 2 days is still working (since the device sometimes works for a few seconds…)
Tomorrow I am gonna have to hit Akiba again I guess, and get this shit replaced. Bah.
In any case, all in all I am quite happy, but I miss my girlfriend a lot. Will I survive 4 weeks here without her? Time will tell.
Until then, we’re off to Taito Ryokan to get our 6 hours of sleep. I’ll try to get some more pics up tomorrow, when I get the HD case fixed.
For now, enjoy that which you have recieved, and cheerio.
PS: my mobile phone mail is d??o, and then AT t.vodafone.ne.jp. You can guess the rest.