Mad Tokyo Stylee
So, here I am. Tokyo. Wow.
A pretty standard flight from Perth overnight, broken only with the captain waking everyone on the plane up to make sure they had their seatbelt on. Nice one. Of course, I was in the middle of a deep sleep, and struggled to return.
On the approach into Tokyo, Mt Fuji was visible on the horizon, poking up through the clouds. It was quite distant, but still spectacular. The actual approach into Tokyo was quite interesting, with an astonishing amount of golf courses underneath the flight path. It looked as though there were about 20 courses, all up against each other, with immaculately landscaping evident.
The bus ride from the airport was longer than expected, mainly because the airport is 70kms out of town, which makes me wonder how it can really be associated with Tokyo. Met a guy on the bus who travels the world helping telcos set up mobile phone networks. Relatively interesting, in a fairly nerdly way.
Once I got into town there was a mad rush through the office (whoah, it’s cramped!), and then to Melanies apartment, which is set back from the road in what feels like a little village all of it’s own. Very calming, and easy to forget that there’s 15 million people on the other side of the wall.
Didn’t really accomplish too much today. A quick bike ride around the area, some lunch, some dinner, a nap etc etc and back to the flat. The boys are cool. Little teenagers, with all of the appropriate features.
That’s it for day 0.5 of the trip.
Home of Bukkake, Whalemeat and Girls dressed as Little Bo Peep
I’m off to Japan! Melanie (my sister for those not in the know) is paying for me to go up there to set up her network. Now that could mean more pain than anything, but it’s a free trip to Tokyo, and in my experience that’s not something that rolls along every day.
With Caren due within 8 weeks, I am slightly apprehensive about going. Obviously I would be heartbroken if she went into labour and I wasn’t around. But, nothing’s going to happen.
This is ostensibly to try out the TypePad QuickPost feature, which no doubt is to try and replicate the “Blog It” button from GoogleToolbar. Not bad.
What do I have to do?
What do I have to do to get a gmail account? I tried blogger, creating a dubious blog with a series of completely dubious posts, logging in and logging out, visiting the site from clients computers and the like in a random attempt to make it appear that it was an “active” blog.
Did it work? bah.
Of course, I’ve only tried doing it for about 1 week, so I don’t think that really counts.
So what's it all about?
This blog has been created by me for two real reasons. Firstly, I wanted to try TypePad out, considering I had heard so much about it. Secondly, Caren and I are going to have our first child in 3 months, and I wanted to have some mechanism of easily creating a blog to mark that occasion. Just like every other bastard on the intramanet.
So, pretty much the same as everyone else I suppose.
And I also wanted some way of linking to, and putting information about things that really get my goat, such as human rights issues, poverty, hypocrite politicians and the like. Mainly so that I have some area where all of my links are stored.
I might also recreate the Tripography blog that I wrote when Caren and I were on our Wedding Jaunt early last year.
Rock.
Heathrow Airport
Sigh.
Siiting in the BA lounge in Heathrow Airport, waiting the interminable wait for our flight. We’ve got 7 hours here (only 4 to go) before our flight to Singapore, before we eventually get to Perth, in about 24 hours from now.
Prague was magnificent. A truly stunning city. A few downsides though. No doubt because they’ve only had a market economy for 13 years or so, a few things that you come to expect elsewhere have yet to filter through. Such as friendlyness and efficiency on the behalf of hospitality staff. The number of indifferent or downright exasperating waiters was phenomenal, with one gesticulating that we should sit at the piano if we couldn’t find a seat anywhere else in one restaurant/bar that we went to. But of course, that is supposed to be part of the charm of the place.
We didn’t accomplish too much in the last two days, other than walk around a lot, oohing and aahing appropriately, and sit in a sports bar watching the cricket. A went to a museum on Prague under communism, and as you could probably guess, it wasn’t too pretty an existence. The size of the secret police, the black market, and the need to earn foreign currency (girls were encouraged to give foreign business men a “night of lovemaking” - for a fee of course.)
It’s amazing how your mind starts turning thinking thoughts of home when the end of the trip is nigh. What we’re going to do this weekend (sleep), what foods we can eat (pepperoni from Torres and lots of real beef), and the omnipresent thoughts on work. Of course, you snap yourself out of that and marvel that you’ve only paid $1.30 for that pint of beer you’ve just downed.
Caren asked me last night what the highlight of the trip had been, and without thinking I said “The dogsled ride”, to which her stern reply was “Mine was the wedding.” After extricating my foot from my mouth, I hastily reconsidered my reply (but realistically, the dogsled ride was damn cool.)
Our time in Philadelphia was magnificent thanks to the hospitality of Carol, Marc and family, who made their house ours, and also because of the belated wedding reception put on by the whole family. Thanks to everyone who helped with that wonderful afternoon/night.
I’ll get around to putting some photos up when we get back into Perth, so that you can have a look at what we’ve seen, where we’ve been etc. But for now, it’s goodnight from me, and goodnight from Caren.