Jonas's travels: Tokyo
Too hot
Japan, the land of summer heat, earthquakes, taifuu, and general all out weirdness. When going to Pacling 2005 I took the opportunity to stay a few weeks extra in Tokyo together with my brother.
Good anecdote: the electric shock baths. The capsule hotels.
Pre-conference pictures
Nothing is better for your ego than getting
thourougly beaten in sports by small Japanese girls... We
followed up that disaster by going for karaoke (and my singing
is "ear drum bleading"-ly bad). All in all it was quite fun, and
we followed up with the genuinly pink experience of purikura
(which of course is an English word... from print club) and then
having native speakers of Japanese ordering food, which meant at
least someone at the table knew what was being ordered. A
refreshing experience.
Speaking of food, there are some "exotic" things available,
such as bread with noodles in, ice cream with potato taste and
meat ball sushi (not even available in Sweden, the land of meat
balls).
Cat ears on the head, ash grey skin, doll dresses, nazi
uniforms or just mismatched socks, interesting fashion
statements abound.
A giant Buddha that you can climb around
inside of. Though it is full of tourists, of course.
Sukiyaki, excellent food but somewhat
expensive. We went for the tabehoudai (all you can eat), and
downed 6 eggs, 3 enourmous platters of various vegetables and
mushrooms as well as about seven times the amount of meat shown
in this picture. Split on two people, this was still a lot of
food, so we had a hard time walking back to the hotel.
More weird clothes. The OL (office lady)
easily tearable suit, the "eaten by a shark" suit, and of course
the genuine Swedish army underwear, complete with the Swedish
army emblem. Why it was on sale in Chiba, who knows?
The "English" translations can be interesting. Maybe these are the parallel corpora used in Internet translation services? That would explain a lot.
Lilla Dalarna, the only Swedish restaurant in
Tokyo (as far as I know), full of Dala horses and Swedish
graffitti. The food was not really that Swedish, but the meat
balls were almost like in Sweden, though served with potatoes
and rice... The menu outside is in genuine Swedish. With the
classical "kyckling lever" (erroneously) split compound and only
one more mistake.
Always a fan of making a fool of myself
through dancing traditional dances, the O-Bon was an excellent
opportunity. This is a shot of the following bingo game, where I
won a weird little doll. Rakki.
Pacling pictures
Me in my hotel "room". Luckily, I am not very
tall so I fit just fine in my capsule.
More pictures from my hotel. Yes, you quite
easily hear the other 100 or so people (hopefully) sleeping in
your general vicinity...
This is a picture from the hotel where
everyone else was staying during the conference. Probably ranks
slightly higher on the "excellent" scale, but much lower on the
"exotic experience" scale. A bit more expensive than my hotel
too.
There was an excursion to the mount Fuji area
in the middle of the conference. The best thing was the caves
filled with ice. It felt almost like home.
Not all the festivals in Japan are celebrated
by laughing at foreigners that cannot dance the traditional
dances. There was evidently one celebrated near my hotel mainly
by lugging around and banging a very large drum all night. Yes,
as you might expect, this did kind of disturb the night rest of
poor foreigners staying in a hotel with walls with the sound
proof quality of paper...
By being late with the closing ceremony of the
conference, it was made sure that I would miss the samba
festival in Asakusa. At least I found one guy who hadn't had
time to leave before I got there. Abrigado.
Complaints should likely be sent to Jonas. If you would like to have a high resolution copy of one of these images (or some other you suspect I have), please feel free to let me know.