We went to a conference in Tokyo a couple weeks ago. It was lots of fun. The conference was for JETs who are staying two years. It was all paid for by our contracting organizations. Some of the employers demanded receipts for reimbursement, but our CO just gave us lots of money. They gave us enough for a flight to Tokyo ($300). The conference started on a Monday and ended on a Wednesday. Some people went up on Monday, but Victoria and I decided to go up early. We decided to take the overnight bus on Friday night to save money. It only costs about $60 one way. On Wednesday we decided to take the shinkansen (bullet train) back, since it is much faster. The shinkansen takes about 4 hours, compared with 8 on the bus. It costs about $90. If you do the math, you can see that we ended up with about half of the money left over. Even taking the shinkansen twice, we still would've made a profit.

We used this extra money to pay for our hotel room. I found a pretty good hotel that wasn't too expensive on the internet. It was located in Ikebukuro, which was conveniently the district where the bus dropped us off. It was a Chinese-run hotel, Grand House Chiang Tee. It was clean and reasonably priced, but a little small. Still, in Tokyo, everything is small. We brought along, Jen, a friend of ours who was renewing for another year too. She was the only one from her town going to the conference. The bus wasn't nearly as comfortable as the bus to Sendai, which had large seats and many amenities. The seats on the Tokyo bus reclined far enough though, so we were fine, or at least as fine as you can be sleeping on a bus. I didn't get the best sleep ever, but I managed to fit in about 5 hours before we were woken up around 5:30am. We arrived quite early in the morning. We were quite surprised by the number of people we saw awake on a Saturday morning at 5 am. Most of them looked like they never went to bed the night before.

We headed to the hotel, and nobody was awake there yet, so we decided to go to a restaurant to get some breakfast. Then we could go drop off our bags later on. We quickly stumbled across a Denny's, which is open twenty-four hours. It looked quite crowded from the outside, but we went in anyway. Inside a large percentage of the customers were soundly asleep at their tables. I think people come to Denny's after partying and fall asleep after eating something. Denny's menu is significantly different than in America. For instance, they don't serve what we would consider breakfast. On the menu, sandwiches, french toast, and caramel covered waffles were the only things that would eat that early in the morning. After a long breakfast, we went back to the hotel and the manager was awake. He was very friendly and agreed to give us one of our rooms right then, so we could put our bags in the room, use the bathroom, etc.

We dropped off our stuff and headed out to explore the beautiful city. Unfortunately, it started raining right around that time. I had brought lots of rain gear, because of the weather forecast, but Jen and Victoria hadn't brought anything. There was a convenience store next to the hotel, so they bought umbrellas there. There were pretty decent ones which folded up. We headed to the Imperial Palace first, since it is in the center of Tokyo, and seemed like a good place to start. We walked to the park, and passed some fountains and flowers, but nothing too impressive. Then we got to the palace. You're not actually allowed in the palace grounds except on two days out of the year (one of them being the emperor's birthday). There are gardens as part of the palace though, and you can enter those during the week. We missed the turn for the garden and went to what looked like the entrance on the map. Instead it turned out to be a security gate for the compound. We couldn't enter through there, obviously. So we walked towards a tour group that was headed to the main castle gates. There wasn't really anything you could see though. There was one place further along where you could see a building from the palace behind a perpendicular bridge. It was the most exciting it got. We were pretty wet, so we hid beneath a nearby overhang and contemplated our next move. The rain had picked up its pace, so we weren't too happy about walking back to the gardens, much less looking at them in the rain.

Instead, we decided to head to Ginza, a nearby shopping and entertainment district. On the way we found a group of wet pigeons sitting on a railing. They looked really funny. We wanted a place to dry off, and we were getting hungry again, so we found a nearby burger restaurant and headed there. The burgers were pretty good. We don't have this chain in Toyama, so it was a different experience. After we ate, we went to leave to discover that someone had stolen Victoria and Jen's umbrellas! I had held on to mine, while they left theirs by the door. They had even joked during lunch that someone would steal their umbrellas. They talked to the manager at the restaurant, and they produced two older umbrellas that customers had previously left in the restaurant. So they ended up with slightly less nice umbrellas, but still enough to stay dry. We wandered around stores since it was raining. We went to a Gap, where I found socks that were a lot closer to my size, but still not that big. We also went to HMV, a British music store. Then we went to Sony Plaza, a showcase building for Sony products. In the basement we found a foreign food store that was expensive, but had a good variety of products. I didn't buy anything though. It was much easier to find all sorts of international products in Tokyo than in Toyama.

It was the robot dog Aibo's birthday that weekend, so we played a little game where we went around the building getting stamps. Then they gave us a prize, an aibo small bag, with some stickers. I gave the bag to one of my teachers as omiyage. Eventually we got bored and tired, so we headed back to the hotel to nap. On the way home, Jen fell asleep on the subway next to some other sleeping guy, so I took two pictures of them.

After our nap, it wasn't raining so much, which was a very good thing, since we were already so wet in the morning. We decided to stay in the area because of the rains, and other factors. So we found a restaurant in our district called "Tapas," which is Spanish for appetizers. It was a lot of different Japanese appetizer-like foods. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, on the way there, Jen's umbrella opened up and the plastic part blew away in the wind, leaving her with a bare frame. It wasn't a good day for umbrellas. We walked around Ikebukuro and wanted to go up a really long escalator, but they switched it to going down right before we got there. So we went up in the elevator and took that down instead. Afterwards, we headed to a karaoke place. Here's a picture of Victoria singing. It was fairly expensive, but I think all karaoke places in big cities must be. It was a lot of fun. Finally we headed to bed.

Awhile back I fixed my teacher's son's computer. Takao is a student in Tokyo, so he wanted to be a tour guide for us to pay us back. So he agreed to take us around the Akihabara, a discount electronics district. My friend Joanna Jordan, from Raleigh, is also in Tokyo for the summer, so she decided to meet up with us for the day. However, while we were looking in Akihabara, I found that things weren't all that well priced, and were generally the same prices as places in Toyama, so I didn't buy anything. I would've liked to look around there a lot more though, because I hear you have to check out many different stores to find a good deal. Maybe next time I go to Tokyo, I'll head there myself. Victoria and Jen got terribly bored and took off for a shopping mall. We agreed to meet up with them for lunch around 1. Takao helped Joanna figure out her cell phone, since it was all in Japanese. There was something terribly confusing about it. In the phone, you could attach photos to emails. However, you couldn't send them that way through J-phone's system. So basically you couldn't really do anything to get your photos off your phone. It was a little disappointing.

We got to the train station where we were supposed to meet Jen and Victoria and told them where we were. However, this is when I discovered that Jen is not so good at spatial relations and directions. I told her what the closest landmarks to us were, and where things were in a relative sense to our location. However, she didn't figure out where we were, and her and Victoria kept looking for us at the wrong train station exit. While we were waiting, I took a photo of the two of them. Eventually we figured out where they were looking (thanks to Victoria) and went to meet them. This train station was supposed to be near Kanda, a book store district. However, it turned out to be quite a walk. We should've taken the subway. Takao was a good host, and very friendly, but he had never been to Kanda before. In fact, it seemed like he had not travelled much in Tokyo in general. So he didn't really know where he was going, but we (everyone but Joanna, who was quite doubtful) put our faith in him and his map. Eventually he wasn't sure where we were, so we went into a subway to ask the attendant. We were only one block off, so Takao did a good job after all!

Everyone was quite hungry at this point, so we went to an Italian restaurant we found. It was pretty good food, but about 25 minutes after we got our main course, the guy brought the bill and told us we had to leave right then because they were closing. It was quite rude, and not typical of Japan. We were the only ones left in the restaurant and it was closing at 3 for a two hour break before dinner. However, surely they could've let us finish without having to rush. Afterwards we walked along the main street, where about 70% of stores are book stores. It was pretty cool. We found a whole chain of sports stores at the end of the book stores. It was named Victoria, so there were signs all over the street with Victoria's name on them. She was quite happy about it. We turned around and walked back to one of the biggest book stores in search of English language books. They had a large selection of international books, so we were quite happy. We didn't even go in any of the other stores.

We went to Starbucks to take a break and then we decided to go back to the hotel before going to dinner. Yes, all we do is eat. Actually, commuting in Tokyo takes a long time. It was probably 30 minutes from Kanda to where we were staying. Joanna decided to go meet some friends then, so she took off. Takao came back to our hotel and waited patiently as we got ready. Then we headed to Roppongi, a party and bar district, with the specific goal of going to the Hard Rock Cafe. Jen's father apparently collects the shotglasses from Hard Rock Cafes. We didn't actually eat there. Instead we found a nearby Mexican restaurant. It's really hard to get Mexican food in Toyama, so it was a nice treat, and one of the things I wanted to do while in Tokyo. The food was pretty good at the restaurant, too.

It was getting late and we were worried about catching trains home, so we decided to head back to our "home" districts. I think we went to bed at that point.

The next morning the conference started, and I'll write about that more at a later time.