Today I discovered that the awesome jellyfish shots I took were Lost in Synchronizing and not present on Flickr. I feel sad for them, and thus I will give them an entire post of their own on the greatest place that is satf!

The English metro voice
- The Next Station is Harajukuuuu

Anyplace is sleeping place
- Japanese people have a nack for taking a nap anywhere. In the subway, in the café, on the street and in book stores. Everywhere.

R->L switching
- Lock ‘N Loll!

Engrish

- No smorking, preesu!

Synchronized Starbucks ladies shouting out drink orders in perfect sync.
- Hitotsu chooocoreetu ratteeeeeeeEEE!!

Nagasakian school childrens fascination with us tall gaijins, and their burning need to try out their English skills with vocabulary such as “herro!”, “wea yuu from?” and “yuu big!”, and afterwards classmates calling them cool (“kakoiiii”) for being brave enough to communicating with white giants.
- They so brave!

(Female) School uniforms
- who can say anything against the utter cuteness of the sailor uniform?

Vending machines

Hit and miss sometimes. This turned out to be jelly on can.

- They stand on every street and is waiting for those 10’s you have stuffed in your pockets for lack of space in your seemingly insufficient wallet.

All you can drink
- for the price of two beers in Sweden there are places which will let you drink all you can for two hours. A loosing deal for japanese when us westeners catch on. Sweet.

Bread on can
- Yeah, it does exist.

Bicycling cats

- It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

Cosplayers

- Cosplayers in Japan is A-OK. In Sweden: not so much. Sorry(?).

Food

Meronpan: why is this not available in Europe?!

Kaki: see above caption.

Okonomiyakismiley

- Okonomiyaki, ramen, udon, fried stuff is all pretty great.

Taito Station!

- I may not be a degenerate gambler, but blowing off a couple of hundred (read: thousand) yens on a Taito Station sure is a lot of fun.

General notes and observations:

In Akihabara, every store – no matter how innocent it may look – has a basement with porn.

The Japanese loves them corners: they have corners for ATM, drinking, smoking, vending machines, sleeping, karaoke, etc – and most of the time they’re not even on corners, but in between!!

Japanese people _don’t_ like it when you hang in the ceiling of the subway train. Yeah, totally.

You can be a real jerk in public and later say “Abunai! Neko desu!” (=”Watch out! A cat!”) and all is forgotten and they love you again. This is how we got out of the previous paragraphs turbulence.

Japanese people are friendly and will lend you a cloth if you spilled something. Sweet.

Japanese people are in general 7 years older than they appear to be, and believes the same about us: “You onry 20?!?! So young!”

…or How I Learned that the Swedish Transportation System Sucks.
…or I Know How you Feel, but I do it Anyway.

Yokohama. I must be frank and say that I didn’t get to see much of the city – we spent the bigger part of our stay yesterday at the hotel (Yokohama Royal Park), enjoying the view from our room, on the 59th floor(!), over Yokohama over to Chiba, and the Tokyo tower in the far, yet not too far, Tokyo distance. And with an amusement park below with colours of all variations, I took the time to snap some experimental shots (meaning bracketing and long time exposures – both very exotic to me) with my camera with a few pillows acting as camera stand.

Because of the (serious) lack of wifi, we ended up not being on facebook and twitter, but watching several Entourage episodes in the comfort of the city lights, Krispy Kreme donuts, beer and soup.

Yes, this is indeed another one of them travelling diaries, creatively switching to past tense whenever I feel like it or forget what I was using in the last sentence. No editing.
Well maybe a little editing to add pictures and to translate stuff from Swedish when I subconciously switch to that in my head, but you’ll still get the Comic Sans Treatment(TM) (which I am seriously considering as the default font for body text for the entire blog) and all those extremely hilarious remarks I trumph. A good thong to have in mind when reading this is that being serious in writing isn’t my forté -for the record. And yeah, I meant thing by thong, but I’m so keeping it there.

I am currently enjoying the speed on a Shinkansen SUPER EXPRESS bound for Kyoto. The japanese really have a knack fir naming their trains, SUPER EXPRESS is a far better name than Öresundståg or X2000.

Sitting next to me is a Japanese man who is working his butt off on his laptop, while listening to music on an age-old portable CD-player (seems to be listening to a compilation CD “Beat Pops 1″).

A general observation:
What is it with Japanese and the fact that they always remove their wrist watches when travelling anywhere that is longer than 45 minutes away? Are their watches that uncomfortable? Maybe that’s a business idea – comfy wrist watches. It’s not like they place it on the table to see what time it is, they just put them anywhere.

Also, why do business men here always clutter their desktops with PDF documents and other work related stuff? I might not be a clean freak/perfectionist myself, but the way they do it seems utterly pointless, but I guess it’s the same with any kind of mess. My dad will probably be disagreeing with me on this one saying that it will ultimately take more time cleaning the mess up than finding what you are looking for in it (“the perfect mess”).

The bullet train just whisked past Fuji-san! It truly is a superb mountain. I first saw it for real today, when we were having breakfast on the 70th floor with a panoramic view over entire Yokohama, and in the distance, Fuji.

I Kyoto I will probably do some touristing at a shrine or three, visit some of the places that my Wallpaper* city guide has to offer (designer cafès most likely) and relax at the onsen-ish hotel we are going to stay at.

Arrival!

I visited the Norwegian embassy in Tokyo today. This is a picture of my feet, one being on Japanese territory, one being on Norwegian.

Footnote: I’m Norwegian by citizenship, Swedish by heart and Danish by the fact that I have the ability to pronounce “rød grød med fløde på” in native(-ish) tone.

My 6th day in the land of the rising sun is coming to an end. The past few days I’ve been to Sado, an island 2-3 hours away by boat from Niigata, where I’ve done a bunch of sightseeing, eaten humongously good food, seen incrediblyous (have you adapted this word yet?) nature and actually talked to/with Japanese people with the strongly limited Nihongian vocabulary that I yield. Every night has been a feast with full Japanese dinner with too much to drink and eat.

Currently I’m back in Niigata, staying at a very tall-standing building with a room on the 28th floor that holds a view over the entire city. Really marvellous. Early this morning we woke up in the temple, fake-prayed, took the lying-sitting boat from Sado to here, and ate ramen.

My mother also played a concert at the top-most floor (31st) together with a pianist and then we had another feast with the entire audience. I would have provided more pictures, but the connection speed here isn’t the greatest, so Flickr is quite slow. But do check up on it once in a while.