Freitag, 6. Juli 2007

day 33 - is it just me or are these thread titles getting longer?

06/07/07 23:34
today i basically spent the rest of my money. we started the day with another tourist trip into tokyo. it took about one hour riding on various subway lines (the system is pretty good and not so hard to understand, but it still takes time to get from a to b in this moloch of a city). today`s place of choice was a part of the city called odaiba. some years ago, instead of odaiba there was the sea, tokyo bay to be exact. i suppose you`ve heard about these expansions. the district is full with big office buildings and such stuff. we visited two museums, the first being on japanese maritime history (with models of boats) and the museum itself being in the shape of a boat. the second museum was japan`s innovation and science museum or whatever (miraikan), and it was quite interesting. they had a lot of experiments etc. which one could watch and they had some cool robot who could catch balls that were shot in his direction at fast speed. we went for lunch to a chinese buffet restaurant. this was once more a confirmation of how tightly japanese are bound to their schedules. they need a schedule for everything. i`ve got several schedules for my entire stay, schedules for the visits to the single families, schedules for days during these visits, train schedules so that i will get out at the right station and so on. today they obviously made the schedule "go to museum one. go to museum two. eat at restaurant x." the facts that noone had ever been at that restaurant, that i had no expressed any wish to particularly go there, that it was quite a bit away from our location and that we passed like 20 other fine restaurants to get there didn`t seem to matter. the schedule must be kept.
another nice example for this was during my first week. i had my schedule for the week sent to me while i was still in germany and it was pretty tight. they had written that i could answer them with any wish to "change" the schedule. so i asked them if i could visit the family where i had been two years ago. when i came, the schedule had not really changed at all. it was the same, just with an additional point "visit family, stay over night", which added even more stress.
to get back to the buffet restaurant, and this is just a fun fact: the japanese name for these kind of restaurants is "baikingu", meaning: "viking". don`t ask me why (ask wikipedia)... well, in germany those places are also known as all-you-can-eat-restaurants and a horde of people really trying to eat all they can might give off an awesome viking impression...
in the evening i had asked to walk around the area near the house for like 2 hours and i think that this was the first time that i have been walking anywhere alone in over a month! i took the train to shinjuku (oh, what a rebel i am!) and paid my last yen (well, there are about 900 left) for yet another cd at the awesome tower records store they had there (sure enough i had planned my act of civil disobedience by obtaining the store location on the internet, bwahaha). because going to shinjuku takes like half an hour i didn`t have too much time there, but it looked really nice and crowded and busy.
here i repacked my baggage, leaving all the stuff outside that i`m gonna throw away on my last night (i don`t want to seem ungrateful, but i got so many presents from all kind of people that i just don`t need) and it was 24.9 kg. the restriction is 20, but airlines are known for allowing up to 5 kg over that, so i think i`m gonna take my chances with that. all my books and manga are in the hand luggage, which only amounts to 7kg in total. i`m disappointed at myself. (i think i had 26 and 13 kg respectively, two years ago). 29076.

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