A portal for communiqués about my coming wanderings through the world... notably, a trip to Southeast Asia and the inevitably droll posts documenting my first year of law school. In other words, check back in 6 months, give me 5 minutes, and you'll be all caught up.

Return to Nippon

This being my second visit to Japan, I knew I would have to go out of my way to find the cultural shock-and-awe that I experienced the first time around. Tokyo feels surprisingly familiar to me, but I think that has more to do with having lived in NYC than the fact that I was here for a few days in 2006. Give me a subway map in English and I’m good to go.

I found a cheesy quote in a tourist book about tourists seeing destinations and travelers experiencing them. `Do as the locals do’ was the basic sentiment. Fair enough, I thought: I never cared much for sight-seeing anyway. Even after making my way through a list of must-do activities, I found that I still met a fair amount of Westerners partaking in the most authentic Japanese experiences. Witness the 5 a.m. camera mob inside the Tsukiji Wholesale Market, the world’s largest fish market. Even though I shared sushi with a couple of Swedes that morning, I felt like I had seen something pretty unique when I took this video of an auctioneer peddling the morning’s catch. (Uploading soon.)

One place I didn’t see any tourists was the Big Lemon Capsule Hotel, a sleeping arrangement that’s surely unique to Japan’s large cities. Since the residents of Tokyo are accustomed to being stacked on top of one another, it only makes sense that a similarly space-efficient hotel would gain popularity. Capsule hotels are like a combination of your high school gym’s locker room and endless rows of upgraded submarine bunks. The changing rooms and bathrooms are shared, but 3600 yen (about $30) gets you a coffin-like pod with surprisingly soft sheets, a tiny TV with local stations, and an integrated console with buttons for a reading light, fan, radio, and an alarm clock. Throw in a beer vending machine down the hall and you’ve got yourself accommodations for the evening. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t find the shower. (Photos for this to come as well…until then, follow this link to a website about this hotel: http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule)

More to come…