Return of the Powerbook

The Powerbook has arrived in Tokyo today and is alive and well -- at long last - amen.
Writing this to test the new wifi set-up in my 12x5 feet JP 'home'.
Oh, and my Mom & Sister made it here safely too... :)

Happy Golden Week - Your Treat is... Pictures!

My (new) friend Carrie, who went back to DC this week, made my day today by sending me these two lovely shots from our Tokyo adventures. Hope you find them as entertaining as I do :)

-- from the Sumo tournament at Yasukuni Jinja on 4/7. I forgot the name of this wrestler, however judging by the hairstyle he is one of the better ones, lower ranks don't wear their hair like this. (This info courtesy of my next-seat computer room neighbour Masaki.)




-- from Disney Sea, no further comment :)

Golden Week, Golden Week!

For once an adventure preview : next week will be Golden Week in Japan. The one week a year that contains 3 public holidays and therefore means mayor vacation time. For me, and mostly likely the blog, as well. In my case I'll be doing the true Japanese thing: spending time with my family. My Mother & Sister are flying in to Tokyo on Saturday and we will then be off (also entirely in line with Japanese customs) on a whirlwind tour of 6 days of best of Tokyo, Nikko & Kyoto. I hope to be able to post and update before that, but if not, the blog will be back on the block (old danish joke - sorry) around May 10th. Ja Matta!

A Tale of Two Museums

Due to a peculiar twist of fate, yesterday took me on a fun tour of Tokyo contrasts. I was meeting Yu-Ching, a former AMZN Co-worker, for dinner in Roppongi hills but decided to join some of my classmates for a visit to the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Photography before that. Unfortunately when we arrived at its Ebisu location it was closed due to changing of exhibits. Not wanting to have made the trip there in vain we took at quick look around and realized that we were close to the Yebisu Beer Museum, which is sponsored by/part of the Sapporo Breweries and hence charges no admission making it a perfect impromptu touring substitute. The Beer Museum Tour is kept short and sweet in favor of a swift tasting room arrival. Having been to the Carlsberg Breweries in Copenhagen about 25 times as a child (they make tasty sodas as well in case you were wondering why...), this tour really isn't all that impressive, but it does contain a few gems that justify a visit: A collection of Sapporo Beer advertisement posters through the years (from 1950-Now) featuring wonderful images from the the early Japanese Audrey Hepburns of the sixties to the permed & bikini clad Japanese beach beauties of the nineties. A high tech 3-D digitally animated fairy tale featuring a beer fairy (looking quite a bit like a cross over of Disney's Cinderella & Tinkerbell characters), and an evil guy turning beer in to water (gulp!). I didn't get much of the story to be honest, but the whole set up was very cool. Lastly there is the tasting room of course, which I with Dorothy in mind had to pay a diligent visit to and finally the gift shop with featured highlights such as a Beer Jello Desert (surprisingly tasty) and Beer Chocolate (not so much). All in all a whale of a time.

From there Roppongi Hills with its Mori Art Center was next on the list. The Mori had made my short list due to its highly acclaimed current exhibit Tokyo-Berlin/Berlin-Tokyo and features the added bonus of being located on the 52nd floor, and hence providing a breathtaking view of the city (yesterday was a bright, sunny and clear day :)
I loved the Tokyo-Berlin show - which hit very close to home having lived in Berlin for almost 5 years and being very familiar with the art scene there. -- The exhibit showcases the development in art & design in these two capitals over the last 150 years and draws up contrasts and parallels. I love this kind of stuff, end of story.

Dinner with Yu-Ching was great. It was my first visit to a Chinese restaurant (sorry, forgot the name) in Tokyo and it did not disappoint -- featuring superb dim sum and tofu-skin-rolls (I'm sure there is a better sounding English name for those). We followed it up with a stop at a Toraya a cafe/confectionery shop specializing in contemporary interpretations of traditional Japanese sweets, where I was treated to a delicate slice of cocoa-red-bean gateau, dusted with macha powder and served with ginger-cream - pure Japanese heaven.

Thank You

Just a brief final word before I log out for today: Thank you for your great blog comments and feedback! It's really fun for me to hear from so many of you that you are reading and enjoying the blog :)

Ghibli Museum

This past Wednesday I was in for another unique (although sort of world famous) treat - a visit to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka (a Tokyo suburb). Ghibli is the movie studio, that has produced Miyazaki's animation films such as Spirited Away, Howls Moving Castle and until last week unbeknowst to me also my childhood's beloved "Heidi" cartoon from which I probably learned most of my first German. The Museum is a full on adventure experience, hosted in a specially constructed building with Ghibli-ish architecture both in- and outside. It is also extremely popular, which means that you actually have to buy tickets and reserve a visit time slot in advance!

I personally enjoyed the museum a lot, while not very big, it does house some really amazing artifacts from the movie productions and what I really liked, these are wrapped in mood board like rooms (decorated with all sorts of 'junk' ranging from fake fireplaces to british jam-glasses), so that you get the idea of actually truely entering the world of Howl's Moving Castle and you can imagine how they used all of these props to create/visualize the atmosphere they wanted the illustrators and animation artistst to bring to paper... Unfortunately the Museum is strictly "no photos", so if you're curios you might just have to come to Tokyo to see for yourself!

The Magic Kingdom, An Onsen & a Marathon

Last weekend I embarked on a 3 day adventure featuring an odd, but in some ways typically Japanese combination of agenda items. I started the Saturday by joining Carrie, Tag and several other Kudan Institute students on a day tript to Tokyo Disneyland. Tokyo Disneyland is actually a double feature: Disneyland & Disneysea, so we opted for the Disneysea experience in order to get to try something that is unique to Japan (-- I believe this is the only "Disneysea" out there).

It's hard to describe what makes Disneysea, Disney*sea*, all of the attractions are laid out around an artificial lake/waterway, but are not necessarily water-related. we gave up on trying to understand what ties them together in the "Sea" experience but settled for the fact, that most of them are extremely well done and contain great rides. As such we visited, "The American Waterfronｔ” (-- a mix of retro Boston and 'Cape Codde' -original spelling), the Lost River Delta (-- whit a great Indiana Jones ride), Arabian Coast (-- think Aladdin), The Mermaid Lagoon (-- Ariel galore for kids), and Mysterious Island (-- my personal favorite, with very cool "20.000 leagues under the sea" inspired rides). Overall it was a really fun day and for some reason the whole Disney experience just seems made for Japan - here it seems entirely normal and expected to have hundreds of teenagers sporting Mickey-ears surrounding you and wealth of cheerful attraction attendants in crazy costumes greeting and directing you. Disneysea also featured a couple of other unique attractions, such as the "Cheese & Chicken Danish" which i found very entertaining, given that a Danish in Denmark would never contain anything salty... (and yes, of course I have a picture of it ;)

From Disneysea, we went straight to Tokyo station (riding the Disney train, that has Mickey-shaped windows part of the way of course...) where we hopped on the Shinkansen (the Bullet train) headed for Nagano. Tag, who is an avid runner, had signed up to run in The Olympic Commemorative Marathon there [Nagano was the site of the 1998 winter Olympics, which I remember mostly for being the first to feature snowboarding] and Carrie, Reiko (a Japanese friend) and I tagged along to cheer him on + plus to take advantage of the　chance to stay at a traditional Ryokan/Onsen (Japanese Inn/Hot Spring Bath). The Shinkansen was fun, but I must admit not all that different from the German ICE trains, on which I spent plenty of time while i lived there. They are however extremely fast, so taking us to Nagano in a flash, which left time for a first visit to the Onsen after we have checked in. There is a quite elaborate ritual associated with bathing in an Onsen, which I think has been described in great detail by many a travel author already, so I'll stick to the fact that after having changed into a Yukata (japanese robe), going to the bath area and completing the required washing and scrubbing (only causing a few "Tanoshi Maiken" exclamations here and there - meaning "entertaining Maiken", or rather, "Maiken is doing the funniest and probably completely wrong thing again..." :) it felt great to sit outside under a starlit sky in extremely hot and supposedly very healthy water...

Sunday was race day and while Tag was running we 3 girls did the best we could to travel from "Cheer-Stop" to cheer-stop along the route, which was a bit of a challenge given that most roads were closed down due to the race. We had a few 'great' moments during this "process" which Carrie and I will probably never forget, such as for example the Taxi driver, who we could have sworn was taking us almost to Hokkaido, while going on and on and about every type of fruit tree growing in the Nagano valley, blooming seasons etc... We managed to see Tag once a long the way and did get some video footage of him both at that time (KM 20) and later at the finish line, so overall i guess i went fairly well and in any event it was a beautiful day to be spending outside - clear blue skies and snow clad mountains all around us (- which admittedly did make me sad that ski season is over - those slopes sure looked good to me from the distance).
The rest of Sunday was spent at the Onsen, enjoying the bath and an amazing Japanese dinner with a good 10-15 different little delicacies, include some I hadn't tried before, such as the hot-fish-and-vegetable-jello (interesting albeit not a favorite quite yet :), an egg custard with vegetables, chicken and shrimp & sakura mochi among many others...

We stayed in Nagano another night and used Monday for general Nagano sightseeing and to visit the Zenkoji temple, which is known for having one of the oldest Buddha statues in Japan (so valuable that only a copy is on the display and that only once every 7 years!) and also for being of the first to allow female priests.

Co.Jp & Special Treats

I went to visit my old friends at the Amazon.co.jp headquarters in Shibuya yesterday. It was a very unique and special experience to finally get to meet some of the people i have worked with for so long in their 'natural habitat', and it felt a lot like coming home in some way, due to the fact that Amazon really is Amazon all over the world -- same type of office set up etc. and due to the fact that I was welcomed so warmly by everyone there.

After the grand Amazon tour Makoto, Takashi & Ted took me out to dinner at a tiny Japanese restaurant close by that specializes in Japanese delicacies of all sorts. I don't know that i can re-create the complete list of foods we tried and or their names (neither in English nor in Japanese) but it was amazing and certainly the culinary highlight of my Tokyo stay so far. Let's see, here is what i recall:

"Sky-beans" - large green beans cooked in salty water -- not western style beans, but about 2/3 of an inch squarish beans that had to be picked out of the shell to be eaten.

"Mountain-vegetable" -- i've determined later that this must have been a type of Fern salad.

Pickled vegetable salad

Kazuo (a fish) sashimi with ginger & soy

Horse sashimi with ginger, garlic & soy

"A type of Eel" sashimi

"Some dried, salted fish" grilled

Cold udon noodles with Soy(?) sauce (-- practiced Japanese style noodle slurping and failed miserably)

Blowfish (fugu) -- and yes I am am obviously still alive :) [-- I did have Takeshi take the first bite... just to be on the safe side]

Green-tea salmon soup (-- practiced Japanese style soup eating and failed miserably)

Ume boshi - pickled, salty plum in rice & seaweed

Baked egg with 'special sauce'

and probably a few more things which i may have forgotten, due to the smooth and tasty Sake that came with the meal...


All in all, truly a very special and emotional evening.

カラオケ -- Ka ra o ke

A brief entry on my new 'hobby': until only few weeks ago i considered Karaoke nerdy & lame, now i am a confessing fan. I read somewhere once that if you feel tired, sad or depressed singing is a great cure, because it is not physically possible to engage in singing and remain depressed -- so true, so true... There are a few good Karaoke places close to where i live -- they are the Japanese kind, as seen in Lost in Translation, where you get you own 'box' and pay by the half hour which includes all-you-drink obscure cocktails like ocha-tea with whiskey or passion-grapefruit-something-alcohol. And it is fun, making a fool of your self in front of your friends, who take turns doing the same thing :)

Challenges -- Vodafone: "Everything is Love"

I in my last update I forgot to mention some of the things that have been more interesting or challenging so far. Apart from my shopping for groceries taking two hours (-- how do you know which hair product does what when yo can't read the labels?!) -- my favorite example was my cell phone buying adventure:

I had decided to get a pre-paid cell phone in order to stay in touch with friends here and in order to be able to receive calls from home. Vodafone provides/sells pre-paid phones to customers in Japan regardless of immigration status. So far so go.

The first 3 Vodaphone stores i went to (there's quite a few of them), gave me differing explanations of why they would not sell me a phone. Then I went to the one where my German friends Vera had purchased hers. They seemed happy to sell me one, however there was a problem: while anyone can buy a phone, in theory, in practice your passport/national ID has to meet the Japanese standard, in the sense that your home country address has to be printed in it. That's not the case for most other countries, so, hours of flipping through passport pages followed, suggestions of writing the address into my passport on the page designated for accompanying children (-- I decided not to do that, in favor of keeping my passport valid for general traveling purposes...), calls to the internal "how-to" hotline & waiting. After the first 2 hours in the store, we were asked to come back in two hours. OK, after that and another two hours we were asked to come back tomorrow... That day we first waited two hours in the store, then were sent home again. At this point i was starting to wonder whether this was the Japanese polite way of telling us "no", by asking us to "come back tomorrow" every day. So, I decided to give them my e-mail address, so that they could notify me when the contract was ready, in order for everyone to be able to save face and in order not to spend 30% of my Tokyo time in a Vodafone store, listening to jingles by the J-Pop band "Dreams come True" promoting the latest MP3 playing wonder-keitai (cell phone).

But, true to the JP Vodafone slogan "Everything is Love", a miracle occurred and on the 4 day I eventually actually did get my phone... talk about cultural differences -- I remember having similar problems when I first moved to Seattle, where however things were resolved the American way: "As long as you give us more money (aka a $500) deposit, of course you can have a phone". :)

So, i am now the proud owner of a super-un-cool (to get the cool japanese tv-mp3-everyhting phones, you need a normal month to month contract), bright yellow, "pre-paido keitai denwa" , but hey it works and it even takes pictures and sends and receives e-mail! Should anyone feel the need to test it, you can reach me at (please convert this into a regular e-mail address, I'm posting the anti-spam version): maiken[dash]jpcell[at]moeller-hansen[dot]dk or + 81 (0)90 983 94 983

Hasta Luego! (hmm - wrong language -- never mind...)

Tokyo To

Time to try to update this post, hoping that blogger doesn't choke on it this time. There is a certain amount of Russian roulette involved in using public, shared computers & network I guess... (but hey, in only 3 weeks my sister will be bringing my beloved powerbook to Japan!).

So, let me tell you a bit about what I have been up to, the short answer is "a lot"! The last 10 days have been spent settling in to Tokyo life and doing a decent amount of sightseeing, here are some of the highlights:

School: I have classes every week day from 9 AM to 1 PM. The school is about 50 minutes away (using the train system) however we usually leave around 7.30 in order to catch one of the earlier trains that are not quite as crowded - minimizing the sardine-ni-fication factor... (danish joke, sorry folks...;) The 40 minutes I have to wait for classes to start are spent with Starbucks Coffee ("shorto latte hotto") & home work, both of which seem to significantly improve my Japanese... which by the way is still fairly minimal although It is a great pleasure to experience that i am starting to understand things. For example the waitress at a sushi place we went to tonight told us to "please be careful the tea is hot" and I understood all the words (--however it only takes 3 words to say this in Japanese...). I have also learned the entire Hiragana character set, which means that I am starting to enjoy reading the ads on the train etc. - not that i know what the words I am reading mean, but I can read them, at least some of them: up next are the Katakana characters and of course the endless list of Kanjis, which I doubt I'll ever make it through (I so far haven't met any foreigner who'd claim to know any significant amount of them)...

Other fun stuff: As i mentioned in my last post, I've made friends with Carrie & Tag who are here from DC. Given their previous knowledge of Tokyo & their Japanese skills, we've been able to get around quite a bit. School has also been a great source of 'cultural activities' -- here's a short list:

Visit to Kamakura which for a while was the JP capital, loong time ago (see link for details) and which now/still boasts around 70 different shrines as well as the quite impressive "Daibutsu" that is in one of these pictures. We were extremely lucky to get to visit during Hanemi (Cherry Blossom Viewing), it was a simply amazing day and a day trip I'd highly recommend to anyone visiting Tokyo.

Next up was a Sunday visit to Harajuku (where the crazy-li made up JP teenagers hang out on Sundays and inspiration for Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girl song). We rounded this off with a visit to the Meiji Shrine, where we got to witness a Shinto wedding (Cherry Blossom season is also wedding season).

More cherry blossoms around the imperial palace, in Ueno park and in Shinjuku Park - the latter features the apparently famous cherry blossom trees that boom in two colors at once (pinl and white).

A visit to Yasukuni Shrine & museum, which is the Shrine that has gotten Japan or rather prime minister Koizumi in trouble with other Asian nations as it is dedicated to Japanese War Heroes. A group that includes people who are considered war criminals elsewhere... (the sheer mentioning of the name here, will ensure my blog being banned from Chinese web browsing forever...)

A Sakura Viewing Cruise through Asakusa, followed by a visit for a shrine/market (this one is pretty famous too, but of course I forgot the name...

Shopping in Shinjuku

A visit to Tokyo Tower - the Eiffel Tower of Tokyo, with a pretty grand view...

And finally a visit to a Sumo tournament! This was a school activity, we were quite lucky that their happened to be a free/open to the public tournament very close to our school last week. It was quite a treat to sit in the grass eating take out sushi while seeing the big boys getting it on... I should have some good pictures of this available at some point, including one of Carrie & I posing with one of the wrestlers.


Food: I've decided to give food a special mention, as I've had a lot of it and most of it has been very very good. Just tonight i probably had the best Tuna I have ever eaten in a Sushi restaurant close to our local train station. They keep their own salt water tank in the store, so the fish really is as fresh as it gets I guess. The place itself was neat as well, laid out like a conveyor belt sushi place, no belt however, but sushi chefs attending to your every wish directly, preparing every piece right there. This is probably not a big deal here, but pretty impressive to me and as noted, most of all very very tasty... Other treats I have tried include:

Natto-sushi-roles, a unique and unforgettable Japanese experience of fermented soybeans served with rice and seaweed. Natto smells like old sneakers and the taste is not that different, so OK, Natto might have been a one time experience.

Okinomiyaki, a type of do-it-yourself-at-your-table omelet. Very good.

Sukiyaki, another do-it-yourself-at-your-table thing, this time all you can eat Meat & Veggies grilled. (To give you an idea: this is where I would have taken my old MRF team out to dinner, the boys would have loved this place...)

Yukiniku, meat, onions, some sauce, rice -- very good...

Curry, lots of Japanese Curry, which interestingly is more like the danish version of Curry than any other Asian version I know...

and, I confess, a decent amount of Starbucks, which happens to be close to school (although actually they are everywhere here) and which is just too tempting in the morning. I am however happy to say that the 6 USD Tokyo Latte is a myth. A tall (12oz) Latte will set you back 340YEN, aka 3 USD and hence pretty much the same as in the US. In general i have found many things like groceries and eating out (depending on the restaurant of course) surprisingly reasonable compared to the JP prices horror stories I had heard, it's really not that different/much more expensive...

I'll finish this entry with a wonderful picture of an English language menu we found at a small curry place in Kamakura. Mind you that most places do not have English language menus, so this one is really quite novel/impressive in that regard -- it's also quite entertaining in others, such as the listing of cold "Bear"...

Mujirushi

I have a confession to make: I am addicted. To Mujirushi, also known as Muji* in it's western locations (primarily UK and a few other countries in the EU). Mujirushi means "no name" and it is a store that sells what they call "no brand goods". Other people might describe it as the Ikea of Japan and I must confess that i fear that if I lived in Japan my place would look like a Mujirushi showcase, just like my old place looked like an Ikea showcase... I'm detecting a pattern here. Anyway, i must also confess, that i am a happy addict - if there is a cure, I don't want it, i just love love love that store... My language school coordinators** were so nice to point me to the flagship Tokyo location earlier today -- there is a about a million of them here -- but only one that goes over three floors -- the one located in Yurakucho, which is conveniently situated on of 'my' train lines, albeit over an hour from my house (which on the other hand is right next door in Tokyo terms). So, I spent about 3 hours in shopping heaven today, i had to really, because it was rush hour and i had to wait for it to pass in order to not end like a danish sardine on the way home on the train, really that was the only reason, I swear...

Check out Mujirushi @ Yurakucho here:
www.mujiyurakucho.com/
(the left column links will show you the goods)

* Interestingly i also learned today that the westernized name doesn't necessarily make that much sense: in japanese that name Mujirushi is made up of two kanjis: "mu" (no/nothing) & "jirushi" (name/brand), so the Muji abbreviation is sort of butchered.

** By the way: They didn't seem to quite share my excitement, they're probably wondering why western people swoon over the equivalent to the Gap or so. Never mind, more Muji for me.