Coen Circling the globe : Tokyo impressions

Wow. Sitting down to piece three days together for a blog post really drives home how much we have seen the last couple of days. I say we, because as I said in the last post, Sander and Guido, colleagues from my time at SoLayTec were in Japan. Instead of what they expected they had the weekend off, so came over to Tokyo to explore it together.

I'll try to piece a little story together, but because we have done and seen so much it will probably get a little tedious and boring, so I'll focus mainly on posting (loads of) pictures. I will put a selection of thumbnails here on the blog, the full sets are on picasa for your viewing pleasure:
Tokyo day 2
Tokyo day 3
Tokyo day 4

After some previous whatsapp communication it became clear that Guido and Sanders got their weekend off, so on saturday morning I'd let them know that I was gonna hit a museum because it was a rainy day and would check on wifi later on if and where they were (I only knew that they intended to visit, but they were sleeping long due to their long working week). So the day started out with a visit to the museum:

There were a number of interesting items on display, but the way they were displayed was kind of strange. Mostly based on geographical location, and for a few exhibits by time. The English explanations were very brief, so in the end I just saw a lot of objects, but learned very little. Probably if you are a buddhist or can read Kanji you'll get a lot more out of it. The museum is split across 5 buildings, of which some are a lot more beautiful architecturally than the objects inside (the building on the picture is actually empty).

After I had finished my round through the museum I sent Guido and Sander an SMS asking where they were. By then they were having lunch in Shibuya. We agreed to meet up at exit 4 of Shibuya station, and lo and behold:

Such a crazy thing to be able to meet up with people from home, while on the other side of the planet. Global village indeed. We immediately crossed off one of the items on the todo list of every person visiting Tokyo: Shibuya crossing. This is apparently the busiest crossing in the world.

Afterwards we walked around the area and explored various shops. I'll end this post with a gathering of various weird things we came across. After Shibuya we went to Roppongi, which is supposedly an area to go out, and where the Mori tower is: a high-rise building which has a viewing deck on the 52nd floor. It was quite cloudy and already evening, but we decided to pay for the trip up to the top anyway. The view proved to be quite nice, but not so spectacular as the views we saw next day, so I won't post any here. What was more fun than expected though, is that besides a viewing deck, the observation area is also an art museum. The exhibits were a little like 'Glow' in Eindhoven, some a lot more impressive, some a lot less.

The one above is from Andy Warhol (you were probably thinking they had let loose some primary school crowd with fingerpaint ;-)). We finished our evening with a search for the Roppongi nightlife, but only discovered touts (these are apparently all black in this area (?)). In the end we gave in to one, as we were getting fed up and had time to just drink one beer because Guido and Sander had to get on the Shinkansen (bullet-train that does work, since 1975) back to Takisaki. The joint turned out to be empty, but we had our beer. We had a cheery chat discussing the day and our plans for sunday.

We decided to meet up at 10:30 at Harajuku station, to have a look at the cosplay kids and Yoyogi park and its Meiji shrine. However, Murphy acted up: it was raining heavily and no cosplay kids were to be seen when I arrived. at 10:40 I received an SMS by Guido and Sander that they were at Yoyogi station (they didn't want to travel to the train station Harajuku, so travelled to the nearest metro station). We agreed to meet halfway at the Meiji temple. I was there at 11:05, but at 11:45 I had still heard nothing from them so I was getting kinda worried. In the end they finally found the temple at 12:05. By that time I was kind of cold (it was raining and 9C, and I forgot my hat at the hotel), but I did get to see a newlywed couple get their blessing from the Shinto priests.

All this was soon forgotten when Guido and Sander saw the tree full of prayers, they decided to buy a board too, to pray for better their work at the customer to be succesful.

You can see Guido and Sander posting their prayer board and capturing it for eternity above. The next activity on the todo list was to explore the electronic gadget area Akhabara and the electronics shops around it. A picture of one of the biggest stores is below, another one will go in the 'weird stuff' section. The store was kind of like the MediaMarkt, but then on steroids: 8 stories high, double the size, and advertising and people e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. I needed to get a new hair trimmer after my last one broke, and after received an out-of-stock apology from the employee three times for three different models I finally got one that they did have: by Philips.

We were on a tight schedule, and with quite a todo list, but we managed to tick the next one off as well: the largest drum shrine in Japan. Rik (another colleague) had been there, so ofcourse we should also go. Our Japanese service engineer Akashi-san had shown it to Rik, so then it had to be something special. It proved to be quite impressive, a snapshot of the tower below, the rest are on Picasa.

The final destination for today was the Tokyo SkyTree. A huge tower with two observation platforms (one at 350m, and one at 450m). We could see it (see below) from the drum tower, so we judged that it'd be better to walk than take the Metro (which, due to me misreading a map we also missed).

You can see umbrellas in this picture, and only the bottom 100m of the skyTree due to (rain)cloud cover. The picture looks kind of foreboding... and well that is quite right. Guido and Sander purchased umbrella's for 100yen at the market near the drum shrine. I was thinking we would travel by metro so that I would not need a umbrella. By the time I was getting wetter and wetter the umbrella price had risen to 500yen and I was too stubborn to buy one. Long story short: it was a long way to the tower yet, and by the time we were finally there I was very wet and cold and annoyed with myself :-). However, the mall surrounding the tower was nice and warm, I kept out of the price debate that Guido and Sander had, and in the end we took the gamble to go up the tower and see if it was worth the 2000yen even though there were bad visibility signs everywhere.

It very damn well was worth the cold and wet, and the money as well. We ended up paying 1000yen more to also go to the 450m deck, but this didn't really add anything to the experience (except for the cool elevator with transparent ceiling). We ended our weekend in Japan together with a nice dinner and an icecream, but not after taking a final picture of a store we came across:

Monday was a working day for Guido and Sander, and for me it started out as a holiday-working-day, meaning that I had to update my finances, search for couchsurfing hosts in Kyoto, and find out how and when to get there. However, during the weekend I had also sent a message to another friend from Europe: Cal. He and his friends stayed in the same hostel in Madrid during the first week of my internship there. We went out together and had some good fun. On facebook I had seen that he was teaching English in Tokyo, so I had sent him a message asking if he'd be up for a drink or meal. He was kinda short on time (working until 21:00 and doing private lessons afterwards) and as I am leaving for Kyoto tomorrow we met up for lunch. So again, the strange sensation of meeting up with someone from the other side of the planet right in the middle of Tokyo at some metro-exit: weird!

We had a little chat over lunch and shared our amazement at some Japanese customs and our experiences in Tokyo. He also pointed out another few things I had to see, so after lunch I went for a little more exploring in Tokyo. It turned out that the cosplay kids I was looking for at Harajuku previously were not actually on the bridge, but mainly in the neighbourhood's stores... I went looking for them again, but just saw one far away, so alas, no pictures. I did continue on through on of the busy shopping districts, and afterwards exploring the area around the imperial palace and across the harbor. Views below: