November 9th : Teni’s return and off to the mountains

In Takayama! Well, not really. Today started with a taxi ride from Lauren’s to the nearby station with all our bags at 10:30am. Yup today, Teni was going home. :-( Heading from Kurihashi station, we went to Ueno, changed lines, went to Nippori, and caught an express (Skyliner) train to Narita airport. Next was checking Teni in, and then we went off to do some shopping in the terminal (which basically is a mall as well with restaurants and stores). Teni bought some last minute gifts, and feel-good things for herself and I before we decided to eat.
In the nine days we’ve been here, she hasn’t eaten sushi at all (and, in fact she’s never had it before in her life), and we decided that this was a problem, and that we should get some of her first bites of sushi. It just so happened that there was a Kaiten-sushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant nearby, so we stopped in. There are videos to follow after I get a way to post them (probably not till after I get back to the states), but kaiten sushi restaurants are very cool and uniquely Japanese. Basically there is a conveyor belt that goes all over the restaurant and people sit around it. There is always sushi going along the conveyor belt, and when you see something you like, you just take it and eat it. After you’re finished, the people at the restaurant count your plates (which are different colors representing the different prices), and tally your bill. Really fun stuff.

Finally…dropping Teni at the gate, which was a really sad experience. I didn’t want her to go at all. We’ve had so much fun traveling together and this will also be the longest single period of time we’ve been apart since we’ve been together. It was a slobbery, pathetic mess of “I miss you already”s and “I love you”s, and various other amorous language. After she went through security, and I lost sight of her, I made my way out of the terminal and down into the station to catch an express train to Tokyo, where I could hop the Shinkansen to Nagoya to make a change and head up to Takayama. This trip is LONG. The train from Narita airport to Tokyo is an hour if you take the fast train, the Shinkansen to Nagoya is 2:40 ish, and the final train up to Takayama is another 2 hours. Here’s the trick though, the train up to Takayama only even leaves every few hours. This added another hour on to my Journey.

So, got to Takayama station at 10:07pm. Met my friend Dan and his girlfriend Takaho, and headed off to Dan’s house…which was another 30min drive from the station. Oye. I’m sick of Traveling today. Anyway, Settling in for bed now after some chat and shower, so goodnight. Will post again soon. :-)

Nov. 7 and 8 --Teni's Last 2 Days in Japan

Nov. 7 -- After so much traveling and sightseeing the day before, Andrew and I took the first half of the day to sleep in and relax a bit -- sometimes you just need a little breather break, no matter where in the world you are. After our rest, we rallied ourselves and headed down to Ueno Station in Toyko; the park by the station, Ueno Koen, had seemed like a fascinating place when we briefly passed through on the 2nd, and I wanted to explore it some more. Unfortunately, this time of year it gets dark early, so we didn't have much daylight left. We ended up taking advantage of the cheap entrance fee and late closing hours of Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science, where we visited exhibits on physics and space (go figure -- physics is way harder in Japanese!), animals of the planet, science and technology (which had A LOT of hands-on stuff -- AWESOME!!), and nature observation. Check out the stuff we saw!

This old train was part of the museum's outdoor collection:


Andrew and I compare hand temperature to see who's hotter (in Kelvins) in this hands-on exhibit. He won =)


The Japan Gallery ceiling, built in 1930:


The museum is known for this life-size statue of a blue whale! It's huge!!


This isn't technically part of the museum -- it's actually the Tokyo Culture Hall (home of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra), and it's also in Ueno Koen. In any case, the building all lit up was too pretty not to take a picture =)

After exploring the museum to our heart's content, we jetted off towards Akihabara, a *major* electronic shopping area in Japan where you can buy just about anything electronic. Our purpose for this visit was to get Andrew an electronic Japanese-English dictionary, which he lost on his way to Japan (on the plane, he thinks). We ended up walking around a bit (surprise!), check out what we saw =)


This was so funny to me -- a group of middle-aged Japanese men in suits, standing outside of an electronics store watching a video game.

Nov. 8 -- Teni's last full day in Japan, a sad day indeed! Our evening commitment included teaching a dance class at Tokyo's swing venue, C-Jam Swing, so we spent the earlier part of the day packing bags and planning our lesson. We gave ourselves some time to explore our pre-dance destination, and set out. Our destination was a toss up between Ginza, the ritzy upscale shopping district of Tokyo, and Shibuya, a cool area with a very famous intersection (with gigantic screens on the buildings) and cute shops. In the end, we decided on Shibuya. We arrived at the station, found the exit, and...WOW!!


Shibuya crossing is said to have thousands cross...every time the pedestrian light turns green!


Of note, the famous statue of Hachiko, the dog who waited for his master's evening return at the station every day. When his master died, Hachiko continued to wait for his master at the station every evening until his own death, 10 years later. The statue was built as a tribute to the faithful dog, and it is now one of the most popular meeting places in Tokyo (sorry, not the best of pictures).


A wall of the Shibuya station -- I'm guessing this is also commemorative of Hachiko.


Our evening ended with a super-fun lesson and dance at C-Jam swing. The people were awesome, the dances were fun, and Andrew and I did a little dance and had a fun steal jam. Good times! Here's a picture of us with some C-Jammers =)

Nov. 6 -- Adventures in Kyoto, Continued...

We woke up in Osaka, packed our stuff, and hopped on the Shinkansen bound for Kyoto again. Upon our arrival, we decided to explore the Kyoto train station a bit...and realized just how *huge* the place really was! We took about 6 large escalators to get to the food court at the top of the station's attached department store (U.S. equivalent of a mall), where views from the top afforded us a bird's eye view of pretty much all of Kyoto. It was fantastic! The building itself was gorgeous! And, as you can see, they've already begun to prepare for Christmas...

What you think is the bottom there...is still about 4-5 stories up. Yeah...it's a tall building.


After lunch, we hopped a bus to Heian-jingu Shrine, a Shinto shrine build in 1895 to commemorate Japan's moving of the capital to Kyoto 1,100 years ago. It, like pretty much all of Japan's shrines, is a working shrine. As you can see in the pictures below, a *gigantic* torii marks the entrance to the shrine -- apparently, this is one of the biggest torii gates in all of Japan. Sweet!

A tree of wishes

A couple, strolling along in traditional kimono

After taking in our fill of the Heian-jingu Shrine, we strolled back towards Gion (again) to find the subway back, and to hopefully see a geisha (geiko in Japanese) or a geisha in training (maiko); we were succcessful with the subway, but not with the geisha =( The pictures here are from our walk back.

*gorgeous shot by Andrew*

How cool is that? We found an old-fashioned printing press machine in a print shop!

This is a public bathroom. Seriously.

Concluding our Kyoto visit, we hopped back on the Thomas the Train decorated subway (talk about random!) back to the Shinkansen, where we headed back to Tokyo.