Other excursions

We have also recently been to a Kabuki show in Ginza and visited Seoul, South Korea. Georg has written about this on his blog.

The pictures from the Seoul trip is here.

Clubbing in Tokyo.

This weekend we decided to check out the clubs in Tokyo. Tokyo is supposed to be one of the best cities to go clubbing…so we had to at least try it once. We decided to combine it with going to the Tokyo fish marked. It is supposed to be one of the world’s largest fish markets, and arriving around 5 am is a must. Well I am not a morning person, so the only way to get me there that early in the morning is to stay up all night. So that was our plan.

(Before-picture)

Georg and me took Friday off to go shopping for souvenirs in Tokyo during the day, and were meeting Fiona, Milica and Pedro outside Shibuya station at 11:30pm. After a lot of research and some books we decided to check out Xanadu. It is located close to Shibuya station, cheap drinks and cover, plus they had a three year anniversary for the club that day. It was a good club to make the start of our evening. The cover was 1500 JYP (included two drinks, for a girl that is), they had a decent dance floor and decent music. We stayed there for an hour or so, got some drinks, and danced a lot. Since this was our first/only night out we wanted to visit a lot of clubs, so we moved on.

After some failed attempt to find a club called the Ruby room, we ended up going for a club called Gaspanic. They had no cover and the club was supposed to be a good place to go out. From the first impression the club and people seemed a bit shady, but cozy, and had only a very small dance floor. We were about to leave when some great music (mostly R&B and hiphop) came on, so we decided to stay for one drink. It turned out to be one of the best places we went to that night. They played GREAT music and were very cozy. We had a great time dancing and stirring things up. The song “get it started” (with Black Eyed Peas) and Pedro going crazy dancing on the couch will be in my mind for a very long time….hehe!!! We really got the people to the dance floor at that place.. I had forgotten how much fun it was to go clubbing. Have to do it more often.

After the Gaspanic experience, we felt very exhilarated and decided it was time to go to one of the really big clubs in Roppongi. After a short taxi ride, we ended up outside Vanilla. It had gotten good reviews and was supposed to be a big dance club. Plus we got discount because we were foreigners. It only cost us 1000 JPY (included 2 drinks), so it was very cheap. The excitement that we had felt at the last club quickly went away when we came inside. It was PACKED!! I have never seen that many people in a club before, EVER! On one of the dance floors you couldn’t more, just move with the flow. After someone tried to grab my breasts, grabbed my ass a couple of times and sleazed up next to me, I had sort of had enough. Milica and I decided to try out one of the other two dance floors in the place. We ended up on the house/dance –floor. Most of the guys was wearing suits (quite funny really), but they left us alone to dance and have fun. It was a great place with great music, and we stayed there dancing until 4:30 am.

(After Vanilla)

After Vanilla, it was off to find the fish marked. We had some small trouble finding each other after the taxi ride (two taxis, went to two different places with the same name), but we finally ended up at the fish marked. Silly me had pictured it to be sort of an entrance, saying welcome to the fish market, with stalls, tables and easy to find. Not really what met us. It was quite crazy. There was bidding for the fish that was going to the restaurants, small trucks driving everywhere (and those were quite near our feet a couple of times). But I have never in my life seen such a BIG Tuna before…..wow. There were all sorts of fish there…was quite cool I have to say. I have been talking about going there since we came to Japan, so it was nice to finally go there. We stayed there, walking around for about an hour. At that point I was so tired and hungry….so we went to McDonalds to get food. I know, McDonalds, right…but we really tried to find ramen, but all places were either full or we had to stand and eat. After the food we went home. We had a great night out, and I was asking myself why I didn’t do this before…With only a month left, I am not sure I will find the time for another night out like this.

(After-picture)

After four hours of sleep, pizza, crisps, coke and some movies, we went out again. A great jazzy/funk band called the Tengooz was playing at Cork Heads (our local Australian bar, very international). We met up with Milica and Fiona at Ninomiya house and went to Cork Heads for two bottles of red wine and some cocktails, and of course their amazing nachos. I was home at about 1 am, very tired and not completely sober….

It was a great weekend…!!
More pictures here.

Kyoto, Nara and Osaka

A week ago we went to Kyoto. We took the night bus down Wednesday night, leaving at 21:00 and arriving in Kyoto at 5:30. Together, we had reserved a one person room (because everything else was booked) at a local ryokan, a traditional Japanese type of hotel where you sleep on the floor on a madras, so our whole room was a bed and we just fit in one room. The earliest we could check in was at 10:00, so we had some time to kill. We spent that time on the train-terminal floor with the other homeless people, very cozy and warm. Luckily, Japanese floors are so clean that you can almost eat off it. After some time we went towards the ryokan in search of a breakfast place. The Lonely Planet recommended a sandwich place right next door, so we went there. They had amazing sandwiches, and this naturally became our breakfast place for the upcoming days.

That day we visited a castle, the Imperial Palace Garden and the Golden Palace (Kinkaku-ji). We also wandered around the city, to see more traditional streets and places, and the sweet-stores that Lars, one of our friends from Oslo who had lived there for a year, had kindly recommended.

The next day we had decided to visit Nara, which used to be Japans first capital. Nara`s temples and shrines are on the UNESCO Heritage List as well. Georgs friend Joost, who came to visit us earlier, spent one year as an exchange student there nine years ago. He was back there now to visit them. We met up with him at Nara station, and went around exploring the city. It is a beautiful place. Lots of nature, but best of all, all around the city, palaces and shrines, deer’s are walking around free. They were very cute:)

We went around seeing the “obligatory” palaces and shrines, which were very nice by the way. One claimed to be the largest wooden building in the world…but that is largely disputed. It didn’t look that big to me. After that we went to the top of the hill in Nara, which they ritually set on fire every year (yamayaki). From there you can see all the way to Kyoto, great view. But one thing that bothers me is that all things cost something here. It for instance costs money to go up the hill to see the view…. wouldn’t happen in Norway.

On Saturday we met up with Joost at the Osaka aquarium. It is a huge aquarium, very popular (so we went there very early) and is one of the largest aquariums in the world. The big attraction is a 12-meter-long whale-shark, the largest fish type in the world. I have wanted to go there ever since we got to Japan, because I love fish (especially sharks), so I was very excited…and we didn’t get disappointed. There were all kinds of fish from cute seals and sharks to monster crabs from outer space (well it looked like it…). We had such a fun time exploring the fish that we came out three hours later pretty dizzy... After the aquarium we went on a ride in what was until the birth of London-eye in 1999 the largest Ferris wheel in the world. It was a nice way to see the city.

We didn`t have much more time to explore the city (apart from a short while through some shopping streets in central Osaka), because we had plans visiting Joosts host family. Georg really looked forward to practice his Japanese, I on the other hand was VERY nervous. Both Joost and Georg speak Japanese FAR better than me, so that just makes me even more nervous. But we had a great evening and the family was very kind and welcoming. The family made us Japanese pancakes, stuffed with vegetables, seafood and meat, it is very good. On top you have mayonnaise and some kind of caramel sauce.

On Sunday, our last day, we tried to see the temples and shrines we had left on our list. Unfortunately it was raining, and the “rest of Japan” had also decided to go out that day to see the same temples, so we only saw the silver temple (Ginkaku-ji) and Kiyomizu-dera, but both of them were very beautiful. Afterwards we got something to eat and then took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo (took us only a little over two hours!).

We really liked Kyoto. It was very different from the other cities we had seen, much more cozy, but still eventful with lots of history. Hope we get the chance to get back there someday:)

More pictures here.

Nikko

In the end of November we went for a weekend trip to Nikko. Nikko is a couple of hours north of Tos and shrines on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is mostly famous for being a Buddhist tempkyo and has templele place. It was also the home of the BIG War-Lord (before the Meiji period), very “sympathetic” as he killed his wife and son because it looked good politically! Nikko was also the home of Meiji during WW2. So it is one of THE places to go to in Japan. This means that everyone is there too….lots of people. This month the leaves were starting to change color, and that is a good reason to go to Nikko, since it lies in the middle of a national park and has very beautiful surroundings.

We arrived late Friday evening in Nikko. We had learned from our Kamakura-Prince-hotel experience and booked a cheap hostel which seemed pretty good, had great reviews, and had available rooms. The hostel was a bit far from the station, so we had to take a taxi, but the room was very cheap, nice, clean and they served us very good breakfast. They even had a toilet-paper roll holder with music…. drove us crazy though.

Saturday we had our temples and shrines day. We tried to see as much as we could of all the shrines and temples as we could. They were very beautiful and a bit different from the ones we had seen previously. Nikko is also famous for its many wild monkeys and a shrine (or something) with three monkeys on them, probably seen them before.

After seeing all the shrines and temples, we took one of the walking trails around the city and the parks. It was very nice and relaxing to get away from the people and walk in the nature. We also saw some funny looking figures with red hat and napkin around its neck. After asking some Japanese people (in Japanese..!) we found out that these were supposed to be baby Buddha’s and the area around was a ruin of an old temple.

In the end of the walking trail, we had a “brilliant idea”. It was only about 16:30, so not dark quite yet. Nikko is also famous for all the water falls that there are in this neighborhood, and we thought it would be nice to see one that happened to be very near by……well the map showed about 3km, but the text called it a three-hour hike. We thought that we are much faster than the normal Japanese person, so we started to walk, almost run, uphill. After about 30 minutes (and it was getting darker by the minute) the signs pointed into the woods (or at least that was what we thought). We kept on going for a while longer. Pretty exhausted we met a dead end in the road (and it was dark!), can say we was pretty pissed off! Nothing..! We must have taken the wrong way somewhere. So all we were left with was to turn around and walk back down (what a disappointment). It was a bit scary to walk down in the dark thought and hearing monkeys scream around you…but unfortunately we didn`t see one.

Since our waterfall-excursion the day before was such a bad one, we decided on Sunday to go to one of the largest ones by bus. We woke up early and were ready to have a great day seeing the waterfall and possibly hike around a big lake. Well we couldn’t have been more wrong. The bus was totally packed, so we had to stand, which was okay since it was only 15km… that took about four hours (including a toilet break)!! It was unbelievable. During the toilet break half way, several people got of and took another bus back to Nikko (we soo should have done the same, but we thought that now we are here…so..). Two hours later we arrived at the waterfall, and at that point neither of us was very interested in that stupid waterfall. So we took our mandatory pictures, bought some souvenirs and food, and got ourselves to the bus stop to go home. This was enough! The queue to get back to Nikko was enormous, and we had to wait for one and a half hours, and it was freezing cold (Georg didn’t bring a jacket…). The bus ride back took only 30 minutes, so that was nice. Back in Nikko we took the first train to Tokyo….we wanted to go home.

All in all we had a great weekend….well a perfect Saturday and a horrible Sunday:)

More pictures here.