Blogs from Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, Asia - page 13

Arriving in a strange city on a Friday evening before a long weekend at 4.30 p.m. is not usually the best strategy. When that city happens to be Tokyo and the railway station is Shinjuku things just get a little bit more "interesting". Shinjuku is the world's busiest railway station and if you have seen video clips of railway personnel pushing people into train carriages a la sardines in a can - that would be Shinjuku at rush hour. The random motion of people in Shinjuku makes it seem like one big pachinko game with the people replacing the metal balls. You have to know which exit you want and when you do get there you're not yet at ground level to make sense of where you are. That is the next challenge: how get to ... read more

I am completely and whole heartedly in love with my dance studio which is why I'm having a bit of a hard time letting go of it. I've been saying goodbye all week in preparation for my last ever lesson tonight and bouncing and dancing my little heart out trying to master the hand slapping, foot stomping and crazy mad butterfly arms that will forever more remind me of Tokyo. It's hard to explain how much going to dancing has changed my life in Japan - I've learnt half of my Japanese from there, it's taken up the majority of my evenings and commandered my social life with almost every weekend now involving a night out with the Hip Hop girls in Shibuya busting out the moves from that weeks lessons. I've made so many friends ... read more

At 6am we were rudely awoken by the snoring man but we managed to get back to sleep and got up around 10am. We had breakfast, took our morning trip to Starbucks and decided to explore Shinjuku, Tokyos business district. We visited the Toyko Metropolitan Government Building and took the lift to the 45th floor. It is the tallest building in Tokyo, standing at 243 metres, the views were amazing. One a clear day you can see Mount Fuji but sadly it was a bit too hazy. We took the metro back to Asakusa for lunch at a restaurant recommended to us by two English guys from the hostel. The food wasn't great, we all had sticky rice, chicken, onions and egg. The chicken looked like cat and the rice was extremely sweet but the miso ... read more

My first impressions of Japan were nothing but positive. The first thing I noticed was the cleanliness of Hakata- at least the section of the city I saw. The bus driver was very helpful in showing me how to make change with the fancy yen fare machine even though we could not communicate with spoken words. Wow, another surprise, everyone drives on the other side of the street- one more thing to be cautious about when crossing the street. I successfully board the shinkansen bullet train which takes me to Osaka (or halfway to Tokyo- my first destination). Wow, how impressive- being the transportation engineer that I am and having studied about the world's best high speed rail system in Japan in my graduate coursework- I have to admit this train left quite an impression on ... read more

Many things about Tokyo are disturbing, the most obvious being the size of the place. Last night we went out for dinner on the 49th floor of some tall building near the hotel. It was impossible to see where the sky scrappers ended as infinite electric light dissapeared in to the distance. Look, I'm getting poetic already. As we were adjusting to this and attempting to eat our Japanse influenced Tapas (try eating pasta with chop sticks) we noticed that the entire building was swaying ever so slightly from side to side. It was rather like being very drunk, perhaps that would have helped. As for the conference itself we are being gradually introduced to Japanese culture and our new jobs as Japanese Assistant Language Teachers. Although the hotel itself is very posh and exciting I ... read more