Skydiving Videos

Shorts and T-shirts at 14000ft in Hawaii:

Lightning

Fun with the dry ice that always comes with my shopping.

Do try this at home.

Wibble wobble

It's two in the morning. We were just woken up by what sounded like someone stomping around in our living room, which was a little bit disconcerting. Then there was quite a bit of shaking followed by the noise of the whole building squeaking and cracking as it swayed from side to side (which was cool for the first 10 seconds and then a little worrying).

It was only JMA Seismic Intensity Level 3.

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/3/08015400391.html

I'm not hugely looking forward to anything stronger.

Now going back to sleep.

花見: Hanami (flower viewing)

Hanami is a traditional custom in Japan. Each year, as the spring arrives, flowers begin to bloom and people enjoy walking in parks etc, marvelling the spectacle. It's really an excuse though to sit around with your friends, eating and drinking. Or, as the photo below illustrates watching other people get tremendously drunk. This group from Tokyo University (I think) seemed to be patiently sitting in a circle waiting for their name to be called, whereupon they would leap up, scream something as loud as they could to the enthused crowd before downing a beer - I guess the endgame was to demolish the beer pyramid at the centre of their party. It was quite bizarre - but great fun.

Snowboarding

We've been snowboarding a lot. Pretty much every weekend - bar business trips, Christmas and one rest weekend. The next four weekends are lined up as well. It's been a bumper year apparently. The other day, we went to Kagura (a popular place for Tokyo day trippers), which had been closed for three days because of blizzards and high winds. The effect of this was that there was about 1.5metres of untracked powder on the mountain. I never thought I'd see too much powder.

We got all kitted out with transceivers, shovels, probes and snowshoes. I sniggered as we practised using the transceivers because I could see eager groups pushing a path through the powder to the next ridge (note: walking thorough deep powder is not easy, even with snow shoes), and I knew we'd just follow their path. And, after we'd finished our avalanche rescue training, we did follow their path. In 45 minutes, they'd only made it a couple of hundred metres, and we soon caught them. Our group managed to push maybe 20 metres on a different tack, and then decided that it would be best to just scoot down the hill and walk back up their track. The thing is, scooting down the hill was not as easy as I thought it would be. I've seen a fair amount of powder in my time now - but nothing prepared me for this. The start was easy, but when I eventually stopped (not because I fell, I might add, but because the slope wasn't steep enough for the depth of snow) I was quite utterly stranded. It took about 30 minutes to move / swim 3 metres. From there I was (thankfully) able via an amazing feet of balance to reattached my board whilst perched delicately on my guide's track - it was similar to skating on thin ice.

After that single run, we just stuck to the pistes.

Tokyo Towa

Given the iconic status of the Eiffel Tower, it was a surprise to me to find that in 1958 Japan had built a bigger, some might say, better version as a demonstration of its "ascendancy as a global economic powerhouse" (to quote Wikipedia).

The Japanese version is 8.6 metres taller yet weighs about half as much. Other curious facts are that it was illuminated in green for the Japanese premier of the Matrix Reloaded and that it has a tendency to destroyed in various manners during the climatic scenes in certain anime and manga genres.

I went for a wander around the base of the other day. The queue to actually go up was very very long.

It's actually quite difficult to take a nice shot of it from a distance, because of the height of neighbouring buildings. So I took this one instead.

Fuji-san again

The other evening the Sun set behind Fuji-san, as viewed from my apartment, by the time I ran from the living to the bedroom where my camera was, and back again, it had gone. How annoying.

Snow Queues

This is how we queue for lifts in Japan. On the one hand, it's a lot more civilised than any European resort I've been to. On the other hand, it makes the queues seem very, very long!

わたしわ は bejitarian です

I went for dinner after work on Friday with people from work and 4 out of 10 were veggies. That's quite incredible for Japan - it's not easy here.

I've had some had some wacky foods this week. Tempura Banana in katsu curry sauce with king prawn. Iced Jasmine tea through a half-inch diameter straw with half-inch sized black jelly / tapioca balls in the tea - actually very tasty. Green tea flavoured chocolate, also very good.















13949712720901ForOSX (see Google).

Fuji-san

I went for a great walk at the weekend with some friends from work. We picked it randomly from the Lonely Planet Guide to Hiking in Japan.

It was pretty hard going. Extremely steep climb for about two hours. And even, then we only got a disappointing view of Fuji. After that though, we walked along a steep ridge for a couple of hours, and when we emerged we got a great view. Shortly after the photo below was taken we also saw some wild monkeys. I was too lazy to take my camera, but Lee did so here is a picture courtesy of him.

Can't get enough of those sparkly skylines

I've been so slack at posting. Sorry. I have been quite busy. I'm in Hong Kong at the moment. As of tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I'll have my official Japanese work visa.

Hong Kong is an amazing place. It's closer to Singapore in style than Tokyo, but more rough round the edges. The buildings are a lot taller, and generally things are cheaper. A taxi from the office to my hotel cost 16 HKD. Which is a pound, for example.

It's sometimes hard on these trips to squeeze in a bit of sightseeing. But C's here and we've been busy when I've not been working. Upon arrival we found a nice cafe to have lunch. Did a bit of random wandering and then took the peak tram to a vantage point high above the city. (See attached photo). It was quite spectacular. It's hard to say whether the smog added or detracted from the view.

The Lonely Planet guide has been its usual, unreliable self. Both restaurants I selected last night had actually shut down, not something you want to discover after working up an appetite by walking to them. I really should stick to the Rough Guides. As well as noticing a vague trend for them to have more reliable information, I think they have significantly better maps.

Comments

I've changed the settings of this blog, so that you can leave comments without having a Google account. Might have to change it back if there is too much spam, but we'll see what happens.

Boat Quay - Singapore

I had lunch down at a little place in the bottom right on Sunday. Whilst eating, and watching the Grand Prix, a large thunderstorm passed overhead and the buildings above were struck several times. The noise was incredible!

Nighttime Safari - Singapore

Technically, this post is off-topic. It's nothing to do with Tokyo, or even Japan. But as it happens, I'm in Singapore for the week and I've just come back from Singapore Night Safari. What great fun! It's pretty tricky to take photos in the dark, with no flash, but a nice IS lens along with some heavy post-processing in Aperature yielded some ok-ish shots of the animals.

Wandering through the rain forest, at night, with shorts and a t-shirt on, with the words of someone from the office buzzing through your head 'the only thing you have to worry about here is dengue fever, but you should be ok in the city' only added to the tension...

Melon Flavoured

We don't need no health and safety.

I saw the strangest thing on the way home. It was an unusually busy train, so I just hung back with the intention of getting the next one. As soon as the train pulled away, a crew of five workman appeared and put a ladder down onto the electric tracks. Five, because you need one to hold the ladder. Two to climb down on to the tracks, in between the electrified rails, and then to stand on top of a piece of wood on top of an electrified rail, and then screw to the wall a huge 2 metre diagonal illuminated advert. One person to check his watch for the time, because there are only 120 seconds between the trains, and one person to look frantically and constantly in both directions, presumably ready to shout 'Time's up! Get off the track NOW!!', in Japanese, of course.

Shops

I think I've found most of the places I need to get by now. A great outdoor store in Shinjuku called 'L-Breath'. It knocks the socks off Cotswolds, Ellis Brigham and Snow & Rock. However, apparently the place to go for outdoor kit is the Kanda Ogawamachi area. That could be a plan for this weekend.

For Books, there is a great English second hand place in Ebisu called Good Day Books. Or for new books, there is Maruzen in the Marunouchi building (3rd or 4th floor). I should probably show a little restraint though. When C. totted up the cost of all the books I'm shipping over, it came to more than £3K.

For electronics, well, where to start? Every shopping district seems to have at least, a Bic Camera, a Yodobashi Camera and a Sakuraya camera. I'm spoilt for choice.

All I need to do now is find somewhere that sells Quorn and I'll be happy - that and find somewhere where I can get a European haircut.

Dr Pepper Obscenities

I don't think Cadbury-Schweppes would get away with imagery like this in on the back of a soft drink can in the UK. You can click on the image for a closer view of the bottle...

I'm Hungry

Today I thought I'd have a healthyish, adventurous dinner. So I toured the Lawsons for the 10th time on the way to back to my apartment. All I can say is that it's a good job I'd had my first experience of an Izakaya earlier in the evening and had stocked up on potato wedges and Edamame pods, because dinner was a disaster. Everything in my salad tasted of seaweed - which is not necessarily bad. But if there is one thing worse than Okra, it's seaweed flavoured Okra. The backup dish I'd selected in case of food unpleasantness (something I've realised is prudent in most cases), was a packet of Daigakuimo Chips. It is sufficient to say that if I'd realised Daigakuimo actually means sugared sweet potato, I wouldn't have bought them.