Japan Extravaganza Part 3: Tokyo Fun and Nosebleeds

Part 1: Kyoto

Part 2: Inari, Hakone, Harajuku

KayKay got up very early indeed on Saturday morning, as she had an introduction ceremony start of term thing at her uni. Morten and I had breakfast at the ryokan. They gave us way too much food, as they are prone to do at ryokan, but it was all lovely.

After a slow morning involving a long, comfortable bath in the ryokan’s onsen, we made our way to Ueno Park, where we went to the zoo.

Given that the last two zoos I went to were the Helsinki Zoo, where the animals have loads of space and are really happy, and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where the animals live in as close to their natural habitats as possible, Ueno Park Zoo was a little depressing. Some of the animals looked awfully cramped, but it was fun all the same, and I don’t think any of them were directly unhappy.

Okapi:

Funny, snouty turtle:

Weird crocodile cousin:

Pygmy hippos:

Pallas’s kitteh!!!!

Man, penguins are bastards…

Don’t try to cuddle the fluffy lemur-cousin:

Aaaaand Firefoxes!!!!

The queues for the polar bears and the giant panda were ridiculous, so we skipped those and left the zoo to go meet KayKay. We had meant to have a look around Ueno Park, but due to the sakura the place was packed.

So we took a fancy train with no driver out to an artificial island in Tokyo Bay.

There, we visited Miraikan, which is a sort of museum of science and technology. We were absolutely gutted to find that we had missed the ASIMO demonstration, but there were a lot of other awesome things to see there, too.

I was too excited about all the cool science stuff to remember to take photos at first, but I managed to get a few towards the end of our visit.

A model of the ISS:

Space onigiri:

This is what it looks like where astronauts hang out:

Paro, the theraputic baby seal robot:

Morten petting Paro (a little Japanese kid got in my shot, so I blurred out his face; not sure his parents would want his face in my blog):

A dress made of salt:

I made a glass vibrate using my voice and went inside a weird room that I think was registering neutrinos or something, and learned stuff about earthquakes and it was awesome.

Outside was a pretty park thing:

Miraikan closed at 5 pm, so we decided to just chill that evening and went back to Kasuga. We had drinks and dinner at the pub place from the previous evening. They had loads of tasty foods, and we had pizza, and when we felt like we’d had enough we stopped by a convenience store and bought some alcohol and went back to the ryokan where we had a bath together in the onsen. It was a lovely evening.

A small damper was put on it, however, when we learned that one of mine and KayKay’s closest friends had just lost her little sister who had been in hospital. It was dreadfully sad to hear, and I think we all went to bed pondering our own mortality a little bit.

Sunday was our last day in Tokyo. We decided to go to Asakusa to look for souvenirs and have a gander at the temple there. It turned out to be absolutely packed full of people.

We did find some presents for some of our friends, though, and we got Morten a yukata! Yay! I have one from my previous visit to Japan (it may or may not have been bought in the same shop in Asakusa, actually), so now we can wear them together! If I can ever convince him to wear the thing, of course.

I also found a piano patterned obi. It was so awesome I just had to buy it, even if it was a little expensive. I figure I can wear it with other kinds of clothes than a kimono, mix some east and west, it’ll look awesome!

The temple was also packed.

We gave up on really seeing it and went off to the side where they were selling food and bought okonomiyaki, which they were selling as simply “Osaka-yaki”. I’d never tried it before. It was a little weird. I didn’t finish mine.

Next stop was Akihabara, Electric City. We had lunch at the train station there before heading for the flea market-ish thing.

They had so many things!!! Anime posters and figurines, clothes and accessories, original artwork and home crafted jewellery, laptop bags, phone charms, t-shirts, all kinds of geek.

We stopped at a row of what looked like gumball machines, except there were little toys and phone charms inside instead, and KayKay put in a coin and got the one she wanted. She was extatic.

Then we went out into the main part of Electric City, where they had closed off a six lane street!

Me sitting down in the middle of an intersection, because I can:

(Turns out I couldn’t, actually… I sort of started a trend – though I saw another person do it first – and soon people were sitting down all over the place to get their pictures taken and a police officer came over and asked us to do him the honour of not sitting down in the middle of the street if we’d be so kind.)

In this building they had a video game arcade:

And in the basement they had girly photobooths. Basically, boys park their girlfriends down there while they play video games. KayKay and I went into one and took pictures. It was a bizarre experience. Everything was so pink and loud and weird, bit we got cute stickers out of it.

With Akihabara over and done with, we returned to Homeikan to drop off the things we’d bought and then headed out to the Tokyo Dome, where they have an amusement park. We got a ride from a guy who was very curious as to why westerners would come to Japan and stay in ryokan rather than fancy big hotels. Japanese people who can afford it stay in fancy western style hotels, he said. KayKay explained that it’s not all that fancy to us, and we’d rather experience something specifically Japanese.

The Tokyo Dome amusement park place was pretty packed. We only did one ride, the Big-O, which is sort of like a London Eye type ferris wheel where you can look out at the city. Tokyo is really quite huge.

Also, they had a Moomin café, with a shop.

I was really pleasantly surprised by the café. I had expected everything to have pictures from the Japanese cartoons, but instead I found that they had the official Finnish Moomin mugs, and in addition to that they had their own Moomin mugs, and note books, and wallets, and phone charms, and cookie cutters and all kinds of stuff, and they all had Tove Janson’s original illustrations and comics on them. It was fantastic!

We had intended to have dinner at a restaurant the people at Homeikan had suggested to us on the first night, but we couldn’t find it, so we returned to the ryokan and asked again. This time, they sent us back to LaQua, the mall at the Tokyo Dome. The place they had suggested to us turned out to be a bit pricy, so instead we went to a Chinese restaurant on the second floor. Best choice we ever made! We had pan fried dumplings, and crispy rice, and tasty meat and mushroom sauce, and pork and eggplant rice and gravy, and it was amazing! What a fantastic last Japanese (Chinese) dinner!

We had a bath that evening too, and went to bed something like early, after packing all our stuff.

The next morning we had breakfast early and then got the staff to call us a cab after check out. We said goodbye to KayKay outside Homeikan. I’m going to miss her so much and I won’t see her again until August! But at least we had an amazing week with her.

We got to the airport, returned and paid for our mobiles, checked in, went through security, had a little food and got on our flight.

We flew Austrian home. They have the most garish colours in their cabins! The seats are a teal-ish green colour, and the headrest mats are red, orange, yellow or white, seemingly randomly. The blankets in economy were lime green, and the pillows were red. The plane wasn’t as comfortable as the one we had arrived on, and took longer, as we were going all the way to Vienna. I watched a couple of movies, and things were going okay when I suddenly and without warning broke into a violent nose bleed.

Morten was in the loo at the time, and I was strapped in and wearing headphones and didn’t have any tissues. I tried to get my headphones off while holding one hand under my nose so I wouldn’t bleed on anything, and got stuck, and panicked, and couldn’t get out, and the kindly Japanese gentleman next to me had the good idea of giving me the plastic that had been around my blanket to catch the blood in and helped me get out of my seat. Unfortunately, the plastic meant I couldn’t breathe, and the toilets were occupied. So, sobbing and out of breath I found a flight attendant and asked her, between gasps, if she had any tissues.

“Oh, my God, what’s happened?” she asked, and soon three flight attendants were getting me into a bathroom, trying to find out if I spoke German or English, getting me cold towels, tissues, wet wipes and all sorts of useful things.

I stoppered my nose with a tissue, washed my hands and returned to my seat. I fear, however, that my jumper might be ruined:

One of the flight attendants explained to me that the dry air and the altitude can sometimes cause nosebleeds and that it was nothing to worry about. I used to get nosebleeds really easy when I was younger, so I wasn’t really worried, but the reassurance was nice.

We had four hours in Vienna. By now, I was crabby and whiny and complained about everything, and Morten was sleepy and hated me a little bit for not shutting up. We had a, for me at least, somewhat unsatisfactory dinner at a café, looked around the shops a bit and then sat down at our gate.

On the flight to Oslo I started bleeding again. This time I had some tissues left over from last time and didn’t panic, but asked for a wet wipe and they brought me more cold towels and made sure I was okay.

We landed just after 11 pm, and weren’t home until one in the morning. We went straight to bed.

Today, we’re tired and I think I’m coming down with a cold. We have a lot of unpacking to do, and gifts to give to people. As usual, I return to find, to my enormous surprise, that the world has kept on turning while I’ve been away. I have a million e-mails and lot of stuff to catch up on, but it’s good to be home.