Travels and yarn in Japan (a retrospective) - part I

Well, I never got around to blogging my Japan trip, and since it was coming up on 2 months ago (July 6-12), I figure I should at least hit the highlights. I'll make this part 1 - most of the knitting stuff will be in part 2... (and, after spending a good few hours blogging this (and eating dinner, and taking a walk, etc, etc - be warned, part 1 is huge!!)

I've already shown the progress that I made on my Cabled Tank Top on the trip, mostly on the 10-hour flights there and back. The other major knitting-related accomplishment, besides tank-toppage on various modes of transportaion, was visiting a wonderful hand-dying yarn store near the factory in the mountains near Mt. Fuji 2 hours outside Tokyo. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Day 1 (Friday) - leave Portland in the afternoon. Fly in plane for 10 hours, knitting and watching movies.

Day 2 (Saturday) - arrive at 5 PM Tokyo time, even though flight was only 10 hours. Yikes, international dateline and jetlag! Take "limousine bus" (really just a bus, with cupholders!) to the Imperial Hotel downtown. Narita airport is over an hour outside of the city, so plenty of knitting time. Eat an energy bar from my backpack stash, and crash by 8PM Tokyo time (4AM Portland).

Day 3 (Sunday - a really really long day and blog post) - my only full free day, in Tokyo. Up around 5, found Andy and my brother on chat, stared at maps and guides, and finally was driven out of the room by hunger. Considered the American-style breakfast at the hotel, but it didn't open for 10 minutes and was expensive; one of my guides said one could always walk into a corner store and get a cheap rice roll for a quick meal, so I set out in search of that, with a brief detour through Hibiya Park across from the hotel, noting the prevalence of feral cats and homeless people just waking up.

I then crossed a couple of streets and found the perfect place for breakfast - much cheaper and more authentic than the hotel. Lots of youngish business people were also grabbing breakfast there.

Fortified with rice rolls (one with a sweetish fish type thing - maybe crab? - and one with rather bland red beans I think) and bottled cold green tea (mmmm!), I wandered around Ginza, the dowtown shopping district, for a while, and then hopped on the subway to go to Asakusa, an "old-style Tokyo" district famous for its temple and, apparantly, its kitchen supply market area.

One of the interesting things about Tokyo is the highly efficient use of space (and relative lack of greenspace in the city from what I could see). Here are a bunch of restaurants underneath the raised train tracks, right around the corner from the AM/PM.

First thing in Asakusa (besides a swell of pride at succesful subway navigation!), I headed across the wafer to the giant turd building (er, HQ of Asahi beer) to find a geocache in the plaza there. Yeah, trans-pacific geocaching!

Then I, along with hundreds of Japanese and a smattering of other tourists, headed for the Sensoji temple. After entering the great old gates, one encounters a huge market of traditional &/or touristy goods and snacks. I picked up a few little things (Tabi socks for the nieces, snacks for me) and wandered towards the temple itself.

I didn't get really great pics of the temple itself (and honestly, too look at it wasn't overwhelming or anything, and since I didn't know the history I didn't stay very long), but here are some snippets of the area around it. Interpretations of cultural or religious symbology should be taken with a huge grain of salt (and hopefully no offence if woefully inaccurate), since I am remembering from a borrowed guidebook and quick searchings on the web.

Burning incence in front of the temple - wave it towards any part of your body that needs healing.

Raccoon-dog god statue in a shrine at the edge of the temple complex.

Dragon shrine, same area

I wandered out of the temple and on the guidebook's suggested walking route towards the kitchen/restaurant supply district. But on Sunday, most of these stores were closed (though I did see the building topped by a giant chef's head!). So I walked further up, and happened to wander into a street fair! It was the perfect place to get a late lunch: a 100-yen (<$1) sausage on a stick, a slice of very juicy watermelon... people warned me that eating in Japan would be expensive, but not at the places I frequented for breakfast and lunch!

I think of all my exploring that day, the street fair was my favorite. It was just great to see the mix of adults, kids, dogs (quite a few small dogs in strollers!), mostly modern but a few in traditional dress, doing the market/festival thing. None of my Japanese colleagues, when I asked them later, knew if there was a specific reason for the the festival.

Some of the other onlookers were also fun to watch!

I got back to the hotel from Asakusa sometime around 3PM (I think), took a short nap and debated whether to go into a different part of the city or hang out in the hotel. Although I was pretty tired from the exploring thus far, since it was my only day in Tokyo, I decided to go see one of the high-rise, crowded, shopping areas: Shinjuku

Not too much to report from Shinjuku - I tried to follow the guidebook's suggested walking itinerary, but was a block off for most of it, and lost my nerve when, at the end of a glowing review of a ramen restaurant, it noted "there is no English sign on the restaurant, but it's the only ramen shop on the block". Great! Now, if only I knew how to recognize a ramen shop!

So, I ended up in a 7-story department store, real old-style compared to the small Macys and Penney's and things in Portland - the 7th floor had several restaurants, so I picked Chinese as we have a dearth of good Chinese food in Portland - and I was tired enough to know I wouldn't appreciate sushi or high-end Japanese cuisine. Then a little more city wandering, then train back to hotel, to bed, and the next day to meet my "sales engineer" who would escort me to the factory in Yaminashi.

Just a few (hah!) brief (hah, hah!) photos of Shinjuku - I'm getting tired of blogging, and this is dragging on!!

I'm presuming this was an anti-war protest, by the train station. Ominous music and video played, there were dudes with megaphones... It was in trying to leave the train station area that I got a block off the walking tour in the guidebook.

Shinjuku, according to Wikipedia, has over 300,000 inhabitants. Many of them ride bikes.

Lawson Station, a convenience store chain I saw all over the place in Tokyo (waves to certain readers!)

Toy food from the children's floor of the department store

I wandered around a big bookstore, but wasn't successful in finding an English language section (have I mentioned that I don't speak or read Japanese?). I did stumble upon the knitting (crocheting? crafting?) section :)

Finally, Shinjuku at night. This is how I'd pictured Tokyo, and while I was glad to have found the neon-crowded part, I was really happy to have explored multiple areas, gotten a teeny feel for some of it, and taken lots of pictures. Unlike my husband, who in multiple trips to Japan a couple of years ago, brought back pics of Tokyo Disneyland from the bus, a toilet (granted, the toilets were pretty cool, and I'll post pics of my own in part II), and the electric kettle in the hotel room:P

Man, what a long blog post. Congrats if you made it to the end! Part II later this week!