Blogs from Japan, Asia - page 925

I went to Japan with a buddy named Eugene in July of 2004 (I transferred to I.R.R. for several months - yes, I milked it). I was at a Business Language program in Korea and decided to fly out to Japan with P-U-gene after meeting him from the kiddie program. Eugene was a kid prodigy graduating from college at 19 years old. He went to Washington State University (in Seattle), where I incidentally am at right now, visiting over the memorial day holiday. Our itenary included Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo. We ended up checking out cameras but nonetheless, I didn't buy one, nor did I have the presence of mind to take advantage of any of the photo ops. The following pictures come from his gallery of photos... ... read more

There are things here I just can not get my head around. I think it starts with this keyboard. Writing anything is a real chore, not much is where it usually is on this thing. I had to change 3 computers because the @ key would not work... there were 3 employees crowded around the computers I was on trying to get it to work. And I think i've just found the ' button. The Japanese have a culture where it is totally ordinary for people to read real hardcore books of porn while sitting next to a small school girl at the train station, or on a bus.... yet they are really polite and respectful, it,s just so strange. Some people also stare at foreigners.. and then u:ll get those people who you will ask for directions in ... read more

Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 12:04:50 -0700 (PDT) From: "Eric Bram" nardobram@yahoo.com Subject: forward to anyone who may want to read Hello all, Feel free to delete this message if you don't want to here about my travels because this is all there is in here. I can't get personal with each email so welcome to Generic email #1. With that out of the way... We're in Tokyo and it really is a magnificent city. Much like New York but at the same time, not. The Japanese people are one of two ways, either very friendly or want nothing to do with foreigners. In America, you see an Asian person, and you assume that they are Americans. Here you see a Caucasian and you assume they are a foreigner. They also don't accept tips here, so ... read more

Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 12:00:13 -0700 (PDT) From: "Eric Bram" nardobram@yahoo.com Subject: Interesting Japanese info to impress your friends *I noticed that they didn't have any clunker cars like my 1996 Honda del sol on the road. It turns out that in Japan, car registration actually goes up the older the car gets. This makes sense because older cars are more likely to break down on the road, get worse mileage,etc. It also stimulates the economy because people are buying new cars all the time and they export their three year old "junkers" to places like eastern europe. Scooters are obviously huge here because the prices are constricting to some. *Never stick your chopsticks in your rice. It's a symbol of death *Never pass food from chopstick to chopstick. Yes, another symbol of death. ... read more

Wednesday 26th May – Open Sea – Okinawa I awoke during the night to hear Tony snoring loudly for the first time in ages then again at 7am by a breakfast announcement, Japan is an hour ahead of Taiwan, so it’s 8am. I am hungry as we haven’t eaten since 5pm last night, so went and unfortunately had to pay Y700 ($9) each for toast, ham, a fried egg and corn soup, filling but expensive. At about 1230pm, we noticed the engines had slowed so we went up on deck to see Okinawa’s coastline come into view and were greeted by two American fighter jets which buzzed over our heads and landed at the nearby airport. Our Japanese backpacker friend was with us, we don’t really know his name but it sounds like “Momo”, he has ... read more