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Published: January 29th 2012
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The cheapest way I'd found of getting us around during our holiday was to use the local trains. There is a special deal you can get during two holiday periods in Japan, called a Seishun Kippu 18 - a ticket for 11,000 yen (roughly £90) which gives you five trains rides. You can share the ticket (so between us we used four of the rides). There is no limit to how far you can travel in a day, changing as many times as you want and stopping off at locations for a few hours if you wish, but each of the five tickets only lasts a day from when you start using it. You also have about two weeks in which to use the tickets. The only limitation is it is only for local trains, which have a lot of stops, so the journey can take a while. Fortunately I love train journeys, and although the local trains were fairly crowded with it being around New Year, we didn't have too much trouble getting a seat.
To get from Hiroshima to Tokyo, however, the local trains would have taken far too long, so I booked us tickets on a Shinkansen
- the Japanese high speed bullet train. These super trains go so fast you almost feel you are on an airplane, with popping ears. The downside is they are pretty expensive - for one way to Tokyo you are looking at about £150 per person. Standard class is comfortable, although nothing flashy (I was a bit disappointed the carriage didn't have wifi or a buffet cart, but it was much more comfortable than the local trains, and the four hours to Tokyo flew by.
We had a few days in Tokyo before Dave headed back home. We managed to pack in quite a lot - with a visit to some famous Tokyo sights such as the Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa, the famous indie shopping area of Harajuku and the electronics district of Akihabara, as well as exploring more of Shinjuku and the crazy huge crossing in Shibuya, which is one of the busiest scramble crossings in the world.
We set the alarm for 5am on Friday morning, and headed for the famous
Tsukiji Fish Market in the hope of catching the early morning tuna auction. On the metro there I stumbled across an article on my phone's internet access that
said the market wasn't allowing tourists into the main area until 9am and no longer to the tuna auction, as some idiots had recently upset the market traders by touching the fish (and thus spoiling it for sale). Each tuna fish goes for hundreds of pounds, so you can see why it would cause a problem. Thus when we arrived at the market at 6.30am I was nervous about venturing in, but Dave suggested we give it a try - after all, they'd soon send us away if we weren't supposed to be there. We saw a few other people with cameras heading that way, so decided to give it a try.
Getting into the giant warehouse was a mission in itself - not because of security or anything, but because of the little motorised vans the traders us to move the fish around. They were whizzing all over the place, so you had to keep your wits about you not to get run over - that and dodging the pools of fishy water on the ground made it quite a tricky entrance. The market itself was a hive of activity. A vast covered warehouse, divided up into hundreds
of small stalls. Some were slicing up giant pieces of tuna on machines (I never realised how huge tunafish were until that morning - they are the size of a large man's torso). Other stalls had crates of the most weird and wonderful looking fish and seafood. we wandered around taking pictures and trying not to get in the traders way for about 15 minutes and no one seemed too bothered, then unfortunately for us one grumpy looking guy pointed at a sign saying no tourists until 9am and gestured for us to leave. I was about ready to go anyway - fascinating as it all was, the manic trading activity and crazy vans were too much at such an early hour. We headed back to the outside of the market and settled down in a small sushi cafe, run by an old lady with green bouffant hair and enjoyed a delicious breakfast of the freshest sushi I've tasted.
We managed to squeeze in a last visit to a karaoke booth (I've got Dave as addicted I think). he's is a passable singer, but I can't hold a note to save my life and my rendition of Dolly Parton's
9 to 5 is enough to make your ears bleed. I was a bit surprised Dave trusted me to negotiate us a karaoke booth though. In Osaka, after failing miserably to find some recommended bars and we had a succession of disasters - which included stumbling across a grotty room on the 5th floor of a dodgy run-down building in a side-street, with the most horrendous amateur japanese heavy rock band doing a lot of shouting, followed by a small empty Jazz bar (I hate Jazz) where the barman just starred at us. Drinking up quickly we decided to give up and head back, but on the way to the tube station, a random guy came up to us touting karaoke, and on the spur of the moment I suggested we should follow him. Ten minutes later we ended up in a karaoke joint...however, with my limited Japanese I somehow ended up agreeing to their "special deal" which included a bottle of nasty champagne and a bottle of Rose (that we didn't really want), on top of the beers we ordered. After we figured out how to work the machine we had a fun hour of singing but on leaving
found the whole thing had come to over £60 - and having not drunk the unwanted champagne we had to lug the bottle back to our hotel.
That wasn't our only music disaster. On the last evening we went in search of a Japanese Beatles tribute band, only to find their club had closed. Fed up with wandering the streets we ended up in an equally random club with a 50s style tribute band and a Japanese Elvis look-a-like. The place was full of drunken office workers, dancing away to renditions of Blue Suede Shoes, Johnny B Good and Baby Love. We stayed because it was almost so bad it was good. It did feel a bit like being at a cheesy wedding disco though!
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Dave
non-member comment
What do you mean "a passable singer"? :P