Japan
I had to rewrite this article after I lost the original in an unfortunate demonstration of both my inability to remember to back up files and Vista's inability to function adequately as a desktop operating system. I've had to reconstruct the article from memory. And my memory is faulty and failing. So here goes.
We flew from Bangkok to Tokyo, Japan on Japan Air Lines (JAL). Our first mistake was opting for a night flight. Our second mistake was opting for a night flight even though the flight itself was only five hours long. We thought we'd settle into quiet slumber in the first class seats on JAL and arrive in Tokyo refreshed and ready to face a new day. However, we didn't sleep, for reasons we can't quite fathom, and arrived in Tokyo not ready to face the day, but instead yearning desperately for a nice soft bed. But that was not to be. It's Japan - they have rules. First rule, do not check into your hotel till 3:00pm, do not collect room key and go to room and fall into bed till 3:00pm. Do not pass Go. You can play Go though.
So we exchanged some cash, hit an ATM, and Mary picked up the phone rental she had ordered from a booth at Tokyo Narita airport. (Mary's Blackberry wouldn't work at all in Japan, even with roaming so we rented a phone that we could switch her SIMM chip into and thus get calls in Japan. Technology! As it turned out, practically all we did get while we were in Japan was lots and lots of text messages that were all gibberish. We never did figure what that was all about.)
Our chores completed, we then caught the Limo Bus to the Ambassador Hotel at Tokyo Disney Resort. Strangely enough, since our last visit the seats have been enlarged. This is the only logical explanation as we have most definitely not gotten smaller, but we fit into the seats with only a bare minimum of Vaseline applied. Mary got to nap on the way out to the hotel but I, paranoid as usual, was sure that if I fell asleep we'd end up somewhere in the far north of Japan or possibly sold to North Korean cigarette smugglers or something. So I stayed awake for the hour long trip to the parks. By the way, for those new to Tokyo, the Limo Bus is a service that uses tour buses to take passengers to various hotels in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It's very convenient, especially when you have a fair amount of luggage. It's much easier than using the trains and quite a bit cheaper than a taxi.
We finally arrived at Tokyo Disney, where we were dropped off right at our hotel. We put our bags into storage and while Mary got the passes to the parks, I got the monorail passes. And it turns out we never used the monorail because it doesn't actually stop at our hotel - or any other for that matter. It just goes in a big circle around both of the parks, with a couple of random other stops that aren't actually AT any of the hotels. You have to take a shuttle bus to the monorail stops. We'd have to walk further to the nearest station to catch the monorail then we would have to just catch a shuttle to the park and walk to the entrance. So we did that.
I'll have an article on Tokyo Disney to post on MouseSavers.com soon, but in the meantime you can check out our observations from several years ago which are largely still relevant, as not much has changed in the intervening period. Which is going to make my follow up article nice and short and simple. Good for me!
So we wandered around Tokyo Disney all day, though towards the end our pace was not unlike that of marathon runners that gave the sport up several decades and a couple of thousand packs of cigarettes ago and then decided to run the Boston marathon because there weren't any good movies playing that weekend. The preceding passage can be construed as a fairly accurate depiction of our mental processes at that point - mostly free association with random whining. I think we both fell asleep during the five minute shuttle ride from the park to the hotel but we awoke just long enough to get checked in and collapse into our room. We slept, or more accurately entered a state of general unconsciousness, for five or six hours, awaking just long enough to pick at some food and then go back to bed. Some more sleep. When we awoke the next morning around 10 o'clock we were ready to face a new day. Right after a nap. Face it, we're not young anymore. Thirty-six hours without sleep tears us up. Completely.
Anyway, after a couple of days sampling the extreme funness that is Tokyo Disney, we departed to check out parts of Japan that don't have Disney characters and merchandising opportunities. Finding this impossible, we decided to just go and visit Kyoto because we heard a rumor that they had temples and castles and stuff.
Mary got us tickets on the Shinkansen, which is the Japanese bullet train. It was massively cool. The ride is so smooth it's hard to believe that you're speeding along at 300km/hour (185 mph). Mary's research established that since the trip took three hours or so from Tokyo to Kyoto, many people pick up a bento box to eat on the train. Think picnic lunch, sans potato chips but cunningly packaged in wood boxes with many small compartments containing many squiggly bits that defy identification and some outright odd things that Americans might consider going beyond the pale, at least for lunch stuff. But then what do I know, some people in the States eat head cheese or much worse, peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches. So if the Japanese want to eat cold chewy octopus tentacles for lunch - I say go for it. And they weren't bad. I wouldn't want to choke down the tentacles on a hangover, but otherwise it was no stranger than the aforementioned fluffer nutter sandwich.
Mary got a vegetarian bento and I went with the extra large bento box o' bounty. I'd say that fully 30% of my lunch was a mystery (or as Mary put it, a culinary adventure) while Mary felt that hers only had a 20% mystery ratio. We pretty much just poked at the cold gelatinous items to see if they wiggled like Jello and then left them alone. It was an interesting lunch and I liked most of what I ate. I did end up disposing of a few items in the Kyoto train station but then I usually end up tossing something from Western box lunches, too, so it's pretty much a wash. Even with octopus tentacles.
After debarking at the Kyoto train station we took a taxi to our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Kyoto. For informational purposes we can confirm that taxis outside Tokyo also have lace doilies on the seat backs. Our hotel was surprisingly nice. As we drove up, the façade looked pretty much like every Midwestern Ramada Inn I've ever seen, but the interior was beautiful. Very spare and clean and Japanese. We relaxed and had dinner in the hotel, which we found was quite well endowed with French tourists. As an aside, we encountered a lot of French tourists all through our travels through Asia. I don't know why; from prior experience I always assumed that most of them went primarily to former or current French possessions like Martinique or Tahiti. Perhaps I just haven't been that observant. Or possibly the recent strength of the Euro has resulted in more French citizens wandering the globe.
We had a full day to wander around Kyoto and we got a smidgen of a taste of the city by visiting one of the more prominent temples, as well as the cultural history museum and generally just wandering around. For a while. A pretty short while. It was cold. Not sub-zero Colorado cold, which is dry and pleasant (or as pleasant as something that is described as sub-zero can be). No,
Anyway, we did the wandering and sightseeing thing and enjoyed it a lot. We wish we had more time, since there are a lot of other sights to see. Maybe someday when it's a little warmer.
Our trip back to Tokyo on the Shinkansen was as smooth and trouble free as the trip out to Kyoto. This time, though, we decided to skip the bento boxes and the squiggly bits. We had a big breakfast in the hotel instead. In lieu of lunch we tried some Japanese snack foods to see if they had improved since our last foray several years ago. I can safely say that Japanese snacks have not gotten any better in the interim. As a matter of fact, they may have gone downhill, hard as this may be to believe. Mary got me one thing that might be the vilest thing I have ever tried, some sort of marinated chicken in a pouch that was uncommonly disgusting. So disgusting that I have a hard time envisioning anyone, no matter how bad a case of the munchies they might have, ever managing to choke this stuff down. Did I mention it was horrible?
We had decided to stay again at the Park Hyatt Tokyo for our last three nights. We had stayed at the Hyatt during our first visit to Japan several years ago. For fans of the movie Lost in Translation, this is the hotel depicted in the film. Although it's a beautiful hotel, it does suffer from being a little out of the way, located in a complex of office high rises. On the other hand, since the rooms start at the 41st floor and go up from there, the views are pretty awesome, especially at night.
After arrival we took it easy, as Mary was feeling a little under the weather, and had a quiet dinner down in the basement of the building, where there are a plethora of restaurants serving pretty much everything one could desire as far as Japanese cooking is concerned. I was intrigued by the Snacks And A Shot restaurant, but Mary nixed my plans to check it out. Sometimes she can be a bit of a stick in the mud. We settled on some Indian food in a place where we'd eaten before, which was pretty good and decently priced. And it was a break from Japanese food, which we like a lot, but every once in a while you just want something where you can identify everything you're eating. Just as a change of pace.
Of course the following night we decided to try a katsu restaurant, and this turned out to have several farcical elements. Ever since our first visit to Japan I had vowed to try a katsu restaurant, though until recently I was unaware what the Japanese appellation was, instead referring to them as the pork cutlets restaurants. Every where we went in Japan - there they were, with their enticing plastic displays offering several variations on pork cutlets that were deep fried and then sliced. Mary, although she's generally opposed to fried foods, finally agreed to try one. The particular restaurant we picked represented a bit of a problem, as there no waiters who spoke English. We figured this wasn't a huge hurdle as they had nicely laminated menus with pictures of the various dishes. However, since everything in the pictures was fried, it was a little difficult to tell what the items were. As Mary discovered, a fried chicken strip (which is what she thought she was ordering) looks very similar in a photo to a fried oyster (which is what she got).
The meals came in "sets" with several courses like a salad and stuff. One of the courses, or so I thought, was a nearly raw (possibly slightly poached) egg in a small cup with seaweed shreds and a couple of other ingredients that I wasn't quite sure of. I promptly stirred the egg together with the other ingredients and started trying to eat it, though it was a challenge with chopsticks as it had the consistency of a thick soup. When our cutlets arrived, the waiter indicated that the bowl with the egg and other items was actually used for dipping the cutlet slices in, along with a scoop or two of what could only have been Worcestershire sauce that was in a large crock on the table. I imagine the staff had a pretty good laugh over the Westerner eating the Japanese equivalent of a bowl of ketchup. Ah, well. The pork cutlets, on the other hand, were juicy and tasty and pretty much everything one could hope for in a pork cutlet. It's not a high bar.
On our last day in Japan, Mary was feeling much better, so we decided we'd go and spend the entire day jetting around the city and hitting a couple of places we'd never been to before, as well as some favorites like Harajuku and the Ginza. Alas, it was not to be. Tokyo was hit with a very unusual snow storm that lasted all day. It was pretty impressive and snarled up all the traffic in the city, though fortunately it was a Sunday. From our hotel there was a four block walk over to the entrance of a pedestrian subway that would allow us to walk under cover for the rest of the trip to Shinjuku station, the closest subway station to our hotel. Just those four blocks or so in the open got us fairly wet, as the snow was turning to a lot of slush. It soon became obvious that a lot of places weren't open, it being a Sunday and all, and those that were didn't have things like snow shovels or sand or salt, at least from what we saw.
So we decided to spend the rest of the day in the comfort of the subterranean tunnels that led through the Shinjuku area and connected to all the major department stores. As you can tell from our previous visit, we love Japanese department stores. They are wonderful emporiums full of pretty much every thing one could desire and lots of stuff you never knew you needed. Or wanted, either. Mary did a little shopping for baby things for a friend who is preggers and apparently doesn't have enough Hello Kitty stuff. Or giant fighting robot models (my contribution). We also love to buy things in Japan because they wrap them so nicely.
On our last morning we were scheduled to depart from the hotel pretty early in the morning. The plan was to take the Limo Bus back to the airport. As it turned out, the hotel concierge gave us a call around dawn to warn us that due to the snow, which continued late into the night before, the highways were pretty much shut down. No Limo Bus. This left us with really only one option - we had to take a train out to Narita airport. We had never done this, for the simple reason that most Japanese train and subway stations (and for the most part these are the same thing) do not have many escalators or elevators, but do have many stairs. Dragging our luggage (one large bag, one carry-on and a day bag each) up and down interminable flights of stairs is not my idea of fun. The drinking of beers and the eating of indigenous snack foods while watching and attempting to understand local television programming is my idea of fun.
In any case, staying at a five star hotel really paid off in this situation. The concierge, through whom we had originally arranged the Limo Bus pick-up, contacted us when the service was cancelled and recommended the Narita Express train, which fortunately for us departed from nearby Shinjuku station, so we wouldn't have to make a transfer. And they arranged a taxi to take us to the station (the city streets were marginally clear) and then one of the hotel staff helped us get tickets and assisted us with the bags, taking us all the way onto the platform and staying with us until the train actually departed.
As it turned out, we made the train with literally no more than a couple of minutes to spare. Without the Hyatt staff's help, we would definitely have missed the train and we'd have had to wait an hour till the next. Based on the delays we experienced on our train, the later one probably wouldn't have gotten us to the airport on time to make our flight.
If you have minimal luggage I would recommend the Narita Express. However, unlike its namesakes in London, the Heathrow Express and Gatwick Express, the trains don't run nearly as often. Narita Express runs around once an hour, so it's not great unless your timing is superb or unless you like hanging out in train platforms. We know we do. Still it is convenient and cheap, even cheaper than the Limo Bus, but then again it doesn't drop you right off at your hotel either.
Our flight to Singapore was on Cathay Airlines and we were happy to be back. Unfortunately the plane in use on this leg was older equipment without the newer suites. In fact the older Cathay equipment was pretty much equivalent to the JAL seats. The food was good, as was the service, and we did actually get a bit more sleep than on the leg to Japan, as we had been awakened early and the whole rushing to the train station and stress inherent in all the dashing about made us pretty fatigued by the time we settled in to our seats. The leg to Singapore was longer, too, so there was a bit more time for us to relax and get a bit of a snooze.
