Ok, finally I have some time that I can organize the pictures I took when I went to Japan a few months back. Here they are with some comments:
Background: My trip was for two weeks and bizarrely busy. Anyone who has worked with the Japanese knows that they are workaholics. It is true that they live at work and commute to home. Working late till 8-9 at night is normal, some work even later. So, obviously during the weekdays I will come to the hotel, find something to eat & crash to bed. Luckily, there was a long weekend coming and I had a chance to spend some time site seeing. I took Hatobus tour of Tokyo and also did some awaragurdi of my own. And one of the days I went to see the famous Mt. Fuji-san (to be included in part II).
I flew into Narita Airport which is good by any developed country standards but nothing extra-ordinary. It is built outside of Tokyo and quiet surprisingly the businesses haven’t moved towards it, nor are there any big hotels around, like you would expect to see near big US Airports. So the train ride from the airport to the main Sinjiku station included some green pastures. And from there took another train to Hachioji, which is a suburb city of Tokyo. Getting around the station wasn’t a problem as most of the signs had an English translation. The ticket clerk usually would understand English, even if they don’t speak it. The hotel was a let down, but it’s my cheap company to blame for that. They keep telling me everything in Japan is small, but I think they were just trying to save some bucks. Let’s just say that my kitchen is bigger than the hotel room I got. :o
Starting from pictures of going and coming back from work:
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Walking to the bus stop I see this painted on one of the old wooden doors and thought to take a snap. Even though American culture is everywhere, English signs are a rarity outside of Tokyo. Hachioji, a suburb can be considered a village compared to Tokyo.
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The guy is setting up his veggie/fruit stall outside his small convenient store. I guess they open early as this is taken around 8:30ish in the morning.
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A Denny’s not very far from the hotel, which I later found out served very little American style food. Most of the entrées were Japanese fish & rice style stuff. Good none the less.
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Luckily I found this good Indian place not very far from the train station. It was a fast-food kinda place where you can get a good plate of curry, dall or a kabob for 400-500 yen and order nan/rice for another 100 yen. I did find some other good Desi places (including a Sri Lankan place in Tokyo downtown) but most of them were very expensive. The American style cafes were not that good, and I have to say the Japanese can’t cook Italian. I ate at this one place a sea food pizza and it was soo bad that I couldn’t get the next slice down. Even some of the very expensive places couldn’t serve Italian right.
Some other interesting facts, 1) the servers are extra nice, bowing down and the whole nine yard and on top of that you are not suppose to give them any tip. So, the whole concept of tip in relation to service as I knew it didn’t hold a bit in Japan. 2) Pork is the second favorite after fish, it’s in everything. 3) The bakeries around were good. There was a French bakery place that became my favorite place to have breakfast, that severed nearly everything and their coffee wasn’t bad either. There were a couple of donut places that were good too that actually had some spicy/salty donuts along with the sweet ones. 4) NO REFILS on drinks. That was the biggest culture shock!!
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This is a typical apartment building in Hichioji and the other suburbs as well. Its kinda hard to find a single story building around.
