Wednesday, May 19, 2004
In Forrest Gump, when he goes off to war his beloved Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) gives him one bit of advice: Bring a fresh pair of socks.
I now realise the wisdom in that advice.
See, it's been raining today. All day. Sometimes heavy, sometimes almost drizzly, but it's constant. It keeps coming at you. It comes sideways, it comes from awnings, it comes from behind, and it comes from below as it rebounds off the ground.
Helping the rain was also my decision to wear my adidas ClimaCool shoes -- the ones that let air in easily to cool your feet. My reasoning was that this means they'll dry easily. Of course, this means I'll get wet easier, but I figured it was a fair tradeoff considering how hard it can be to dry truly soaked shoes. By the end of the day I swear I was in the beginning stages of trench rot. It was DISGUSTING.
Anyway, I got up late thanks to last night's exertions, and figured I'd head to Roppongi Hills for a quick bite before shopping in Akihabara and Ginza. I leave the hotel in a light drizzle -- light enough that I figure I can get by without an umbrella. But halfway to the Hills I realise that I forgot the hotel's name cards, which are utterly INVALUABLE in telling (or showing) taxi drivers where the hotel is. I turned back. By the time I nabbed them and walked out again... I figured I'd get soaked. So I tried to take the subway to Roppongi Hills, except despite being literally a stop away, the walking involved in changing lines pretty much meant that it was probably quicker to walk there. And then when I got out of the station... hrm, this didn't look like Roppongi Hills. Must be around here somewhere. Should I go left or right? Let's go right. Must be around here somewhere...
See, generally I have a very good sense of direction. Unlike the rest of my family I'm also great with maps. And being an Internet and gadgety sort of guy, I downloaded tons of maps off the net and pictures of locations for comparison's sake and stuffed them on my PDA. I figured I was set. Even though Tokyo's streets are somewhat nonsensical and windy and poorly marked, those maps augmented by my sense of direction would allow me to get the better of Tokyo's streets. Well, it didn't. In fact, Tokyo's streets rather kicked my arse. For a start, the rain meant my expensive PDA had to stay well protected in my pocket, killing my main advantage. That just softened me up for Tokyo's winding nonsensical streets to knock me out with. You'd think finding Tokyo's tallest building would be easy, but it took me a good 20 minutes walking in circles to find the Mori Building... and naturally, if I had just turned left from the station I'd have found it within two minutes.
That was just the first in a long, long string of bad decisions. Literally whenever I had a choice to make, I seemed to make the wrong one. For example, I decided to buy an umbrella from the station. Instead of one of the big ones, I picked a small one, reasoning that this would be easier to carry and less unwieldy. Except a small umbrella couldn't cover my feet (shoes soaking aargh), bag AND me at the same time -- so I had to kind of clutch my shoulder back at my front to avoid soaking my GBA/digicam/iPod. Speaking of which, looking for pictures? No dice. Rained too much, and I'm not getting that thing wet.
Roppongi Hills is pretty cool, though it's almost over-landscaped and over-developed to the point where it feels like another part of Disneyland. There's a lot of striking structures and architecture there, from the unique little stone mall with what looks like a craggy crack splitting it in half to the glass domes. But the problem was they (for some odd reason) rather liked the idea of, every so often, having the roof split to let the rain in. Just not clever.
I didn't find anything to pick up for a quick bite to eat at Roppongi Hills though, since it's generally fancy sit-down restaurants that I didn't have time for (and even the Starbucks sucked -- no tea frappucinos?!). I figured I'd skip lunch and head straight to Akihabara to snack on Mister Donut there. Except Mister Donut burnt down in a fire a few months ago. So for my first meal on my first full day in Japan... I had to go to McDonald's. The McChicken was really good but... that's not why I'm here!
One thing I WAS there for was to shop. And I had a great time walking through all the electronics stores. For the most part, things were more expensive than Hong Kong, though there were bargains here and there and crucially a lot of items you can't get at home. Among the neat things I snagged was a lot of classic Famicom stuff (memorial DVD, etc) and one of those nonsensical Japanese t-shirts that said "I AM AC ADAPTER MAN". I also bought a big present for the kids (no hints as to what it is!). Still, I'd be happy just walking and looking, and I saw some cool stuff there. There was a US import store there, and they had neat things like Super Monkey Ball figures and even Majora's Mask figurines. I also saw Sony's new ebook, the Libré. It looked really cool, and I'm starting to think that these things might take off soon. It's small and light, and the screen is REALLY sharp (apparently the resolution is that of newspaper) and easy on the eyes. The cool twist with this ebook is that it uses "e-ink" instead of a traditional screen. What this means is it only uses power to change what's on screen -- so the only time it's actually draining the battery is when you're "turning the page". While you're reading it, it's effectively off. It's awesome. Someday soon, we'll see the "iPod" of ebooks, and we'll wonder why we kept lugging around tons of paperbacks when we could keep it all in one unit...
After Akihabara, I went to Ginza for one more store: The Apple Store, Ginza. It's so purdy. I really wish I had pictures of THIS. The entire building is clad in grey metal, looking a lot like a Power Mac G5, especially with the glowing white Apple logo on the side. What was REALLY cool though was that right across the street, the Matsuya building was decked out in a weird plasticy white surface with a glass covering... basically, if the Apple Store was a G5, it looked like an iPod or iBook, that sort of white reflective finish. Really good combination.
The night was finished off by meeting up with Jason Cha (chaj of #vidgames fame) for dinner at Torigen, another of my Tokyo favourites. Torigen serves a unique dish known as "kamameshi", which is basically kettle-cooked rice. It might not sound or look too appetising, but it's really tasty and as I said it's not something you find in restaurants outside Japan.
Overall, I have to say it was a good day... which was really rather remarkable considering just how amazingly bad all my decisions were. Seriously, if you could pick one day for everything to go wrong...
Posted at 4:03 AM
