Train trip back to Tokyo and shopping

Monday 19th April: The end of our trip looms closer as we spent the morning taking the Shinkansen bullet train back to Tokyo. We basically checked out early in the morning, had some breakfast and went to the New Osaka station to change trains. Parting thoughts of Osaka are that if you have never been to Japan, want to experience the culture and shopping along with cheap airfares (Jetstar flies here for cheap), then this is the place to go. Its not quite as formal as Tokyo and in some ways more western in culture, but its still a nice spot to go.

The trip back was pretty interesting as the train was pretty much booked up with people. Originally there were seats available and I wanted to move to the left to ensure a strategic seating for Mt Fuji pics - but kept constantly kicked out of my seat whenever we came to a new station. Anyway, still managed to get some pretty cool pics of the most photographed mountain in the world apparently.

We got back to Tokyo at midday and changed back to the Subway to go to our hotel for the last night (Grand Prince Hotel) which was ironically just across the road from where we previously stayed (New Otani). Once we were there, we basically split up once again to complete our personal agendas (shopping, visiting any missing sites, eat whatever you want etc). Tom and Kalin had lunch together but I decided to head off first to do my rounds of shopping (gifts for the family).

My first stop was to go back to Shibuya and tracing back to the Burberry Blue shop that we visited and also to have lunch (Ramen - with a super thick soup/sauce that was done using a compression oven/boiler to extract all the pork essence out.. YUM). If you are after luxury goods, Burberry Blue is a special division of Burberry specific for the Japanese market and with specific products for Japan that is not available anywhere else. Its good to get since its made in Japan and is considerable less than the full Burberry branded stuff. Walked all the way up to Harajuku (mainly all girls wear stuff) to get to the JR station. Since I have my JR pass, all JR trains are already paid for and then took the JR train over to Akihabara across the other side of town (like 15 stops or something stupid). Took a seat and managed a nozz before getting to Akihabara for some electrical good shopping.

The next stop was Ginza to look around (as you have noticed, I have basically gone back to all the spots that were originally affected by the rain in my initial visits). Went to various shopping places including the Sony Flagship store to check out the 3D TVs (see pic) before making my way back to Akasuka for dinner and the hotel.

Dinner was particularly interesting since it was an 8 course meat with various parts of beef available. Firstly there were some entree starters including beef liver shashimi. I dont like innards - let alone liver, but I took the plunge (thinking about my hero, Bear Grylls thinking its just protein) and to my surprise, it was quite nice for something that was semi bloody, dipped in soy vinegar and had laced with traditional mustard. The next course had Ox tongue that had been wind dried for a month in a BBQ kebab style (that was pretty yummy too) before having some less exotic main meals. The trip was complete with me eating the most bizarre things! :) The end of the meal was basically a Sakura (cherry blossom) flavoured Ice cream to remind me of the pink florals around the entire Japan.

Anyhow, one more day to go and off to Hong Kong.

Lack of posts even though I am in HK?

Yes.. I know I am behind on these but not quite as free at the moment with the family! Posting up more stuff to end the Japan leg of the trip (last two days). Stay tuned..

BTW.. I am in Hong Kong now as you can imagine. Hong Kong is a rather personal part of the trip to meet up with family and friends. I will put some occasional posting in here to show the landscape and scenery if anyone is interested.

Osaka Football and shopping

18th April 2010: Sunday - This whole day was spent on Osaka where we went over to Osaka Castle in the morning and then to watch a J-League game in the afternoon to make up for the planned game in Tokyo. The Castle was quite nice to visit and gives a good view of Osaka and the surrounds. Would really recommend going in the Sakura season for this since there are many blossom trees planted around the castle (about 2-3 weeks earlier would have been nice with full bloom).

The J-League game was rather interesting with two bottom end teams battling for goals. Nice environment and atmosphere and if you can, this should be a good to go (although non-soccer fans would be struggling to stay awake). The japanese are pretty hardcore fanatics, so it is rather interesting just to see them play big bongo drums and singing their team song (Osaka... Osaka.. blah.. Osaka...)

The last part of the day was splitting up the group to do particular things that we wanted to do ourselves in Osaka. Since I have never been, I decided to go to this place called "Den Den Town" which is also famous for Electronics. Den Den Town's real name is Nipponbashi (dont ask me why, but seems like every major city has a suburb/district of this name). Was pretty disappointed with this as it was smaller and not as good as Akihabara which in turn is not as good as HK PC megacomplexes such as Golden in Sham Shui Po.


Anyhow, here are some photos of the day:

Kyoto - City of Shrines and Temples

Saturday 17th: Woke up in the morning with a nice clearing sky which confirmed it was a good day. We decided to spend the morning washing our clothes (as we are fast running out) and then make short trip to Kyoto from Osaka. It was lucky that the hotel at Osaka offers free internet access (which is where this blog is coming from) and through the powers of google and google maps, we eventually located one not too far from the hotel (about 1km or so). After dropping the clothes in, we took the train to Kyoto and arrived there after 12.

Our original intentions was to ride around Kyoto to cover the distances since the city is not exactly small and distances between attractions was quite large. Basically the day was spent riding around the city to various temples and checking out the tourist attractions available. By the time we had lunch and made our way to the old palace, it was already 4:30pm and they had closed by that time (giving us only a pic of the outskirts). Also visited the imperial gardens nearby and then rode back to the station to drop off the bikes.

We did not find a place to eat Kobe steaks, so Tom was a bit disappointed and we ended up eating some cheap Noodle meals and combos (although they just came back from their night drifts and apparently ate Whale blubber..hahah).

sounds like a short day? not really. Getting a little sick (runny nose, sinus etc) along with a damaged leg and foot from the walking and riding (nearly stacked it three times today at various locations).

Anyway.. enjoy the pics.. tomorrow is an Osaka day hopefully.

Train day!

Fri 16th April: Slept overnight at the onsen on traditional Japanese Tatame style of bed (on the straw mat floor, with a thick layer for the bed and a thick blanket). Woke up in the morning at 6:30 and we all decided to make the most out of our money by going for another dip before we head off. It was quite literally freezing outside, but this did not deter us from going to the hottest pool in the whole Onsen one last time. We noticed that there was something in the air and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was in fact, snowing (very small partially melted flakes, however). That really topped out trip to see snow (and snowing) at a Japanese onsen.

I did say no pics - but could not resist going down to take some (since everyone was at breakfast and no one was at the springs.. perfect opportunity for photo shots)!

After eating a traditional Japanese breakfast (Japanese actually eat rice for breakie), we set off on a bus trip back to the JR train station and the 3 hour 20 minute trip back to Ueno in Tokyo. We then changed over to the Tokyo to Osaka Shinkansen (bullet train) for the 3 hour trip to Osaka.

Shinkansen ("New Iron line" official name of the bullet train services) is an extremely fast train service that goes between major metro centres of Japan. It did not disappoint me at all and when I put my Phone (running Garmin) against the window to check the speeds, we were quite literally going at 260+km/h to our destination. Since our pass was only a standard, we could take any JR (Japan Rail) train except for the fastest Shinkansen (which is clocked at over 320km/h and cuts the trip by 30 min or so). The distance from Tokyo to Osaka is roughly about the same as Brisbane to Sydney, so imagine only taking 3 hours to get to Brisbane! The trains was running so fast, that even my SLR pics blurred when I focused on things close (although the far away objects are ok as you can imagine).

We got to Osaka at around 6pm (total trip was around 8 hours between the stops) and the next challenge was to figure out how trains worked here. Osaka has a "City circle" that basically runs around the city in both directions. If you make a mistake (like us), we ended up at Universal Studios! We eventually found our hotel, went down to get some food (some Omlette mixed with sauce that Tom wanted). Then went around Osaka to visit the shops (since most closed late).

Shops in Osaka are layed out very weirdly with mega long shopping facilities (basically one street that is a couple of km's long but have a roof). Just goes on forever, but was interesting. Was also interesting to find that there were heaps of these young japanese Guys and girls on the street too who are willing to become your BF/GF (for a fee of course).

Anyhow, the weather was crap - rain after rain. Depending on weather, tomorrow may be Kyoto with the bike ride.

Onsen day

Today is the "Onsen" day - or the hotsprings of Japan.
We basically took a two and half hour trip from Tokyo up to the Japanese Alps to a hidden onsen resort.

Let me just say, it is fabulous and despite the sub-zero temps here (5 degrees), I can walk around scantly without any issues. Yes, it takes a little to get use to since you have to walk to the onsen with basically nothing more than your undies and thin kimono style clothing, but once there, outside does not matter anymore.

Onsen is suppose to be enjoyed with Winter and snow - common in Hokkiado up north where it snows a lot with heaps of volcanic activity. We were pleasantly surprised that the snow has not all melted and still patches of it around to give us a good sensation of the environment. Yes, its not winter - but that would have mean even colder weather to battle before the onsen!

Anyway, the meal (dinner) is included and it has been a traditional Japanese dinner. It was awesome and really had the traditional feel. Funny thing: we had Bear for dinner tonight.. Yes, Bear. Taste? hmmm.. its very much beef but very gamey type taste. Tougher too, but was prepared in a stew/soup thing (See pic). :)

BTW.. no pics at the onsen itself for obvious reasons. and no, I am not that Hentai enough to take a camera there too.. although thought did come through tonight when there are no one there.

Pleasantly surprised that there is a hotspot here for internet. I am surfing from the front foyer where the wireless access point is to present you this post.

Tomorrow is unfortunately going back to the city and the bullet train to Osaka.

Til then. :)

Iron Chef French's restaurant

Woo hoo! Finally able to go to Iron Chef French, Sakai's restaurant in Shibuya! :)

We bummed around most of the morning to catch up with sleep and had a late start of 10:30am. After walking around the local town, Akasaka, we realised that there were a number of shops that we didnt visit here. We had the task of looking for breakfast - but the challenge is not to over eat because our lunch was at La Rochelle, Iron Chef French's restaurant.

We found some Taki-something balls (cuttlefish, grilled with flour/pastries) and was really good in comparison to the extremely floury ones in Australia and Hong Kong. We quickly then rushed off to Shibuya for a quick round of shopping before trying to locate the restaurant.

A note to remember: Before coming to Japan, please learn how the address system works here. If you dont, you are screwed trying to locate nearly anything. The first is the suburb that you are trying to locate (matches back mostly with the train stations). from here on, the rest are just numbers that does indicate something (and they hardly have road names given there are a lot of small lanes everywhere). The 3 numbers are usually written as 2-40-2 for example. In this expression, 2 is the Cho-me (sub district) as larger suburbs are cut down into smaller components. The middle number is the block number of the Cho-me. Which block is what? Dont know.. but you should check the maps that the government provides at every major intersection. The last number means the unit within the block. Sometimes there is a fourth number that corresponds to the level etc.

After locating the restaurant, we went up the lifts to the top floor overlooking the entire city. It is quite amazing and they made wait at some lounges overlooking the western part of the city until it was time take us to the table. We booked for 3 people, but they gave us a BIG table (usually for 6 people). Service was top notch everywhere throughout.

Meals are selected as set courses. There were two main sets of 3800 yen and 6800 yen per person ($45 and $80 AUD) of 3 and 8 courses respectively. We decided the 8 course since we that was the original target and by god, all the dishes was not only very tasty, but also pieces of art. A special offer was also available to customers who pick the 8 course meal was a wine deal, whereby you pay another 2500 yen, and they will serve half a glass of different wines along the way to match the meals. Kalin and Tom both took this and they could not be happier to go through the 7 different wines from the bubblies to the rieslings and chardonnays. Since our main meal was the steak with Foie Gras and Truffle sauce, the main wine was a red.

Anyhow, I have posted some pics of the various dishes that we went through. It was really beautiful - most expensive meal that we have had here, but worth every cent given we were fully serviced for nearly 3 hours all up.

Oh.. as you have noticed.. my blog is very infrequent and there can be a dump of news all in one go.. I have tried to write as much as I can on my Dell Netbook and where possible, dump it all back into the blog like last night. I do apologise for this, but as I suspected, Internet access is crap in Japan for tourists. However, when you find, it is extremely fast. :)

Tonight is a J-League soccer game to ease off on the spending too.. :)

Tomorrow is a day at the Onsen in the japanese Alps so I dont expect any updates until I get into Osaka the following day. There will be plenty of pics of the Onsen (Hotsprings) - no, not of naked people but I will probably do the forest explorations to get some good nature shots!

Have a good one and hope to check back soon.