Big in Japan… day 1: Ueno

Part One: making way

Most important thing to know:  ANA has free beer.

Here I was, sippin’ my beer and gettin’ ready to eat, sandwiched in the middle seat of ANA’s  cattle-class, when the nice asian lady to my left drops her fork.  Of course the only humane thing to do would be to offer my silverware, especially since I was planning on chopsticks anyway.  After a bit of a confusing conversation, it turns out that the asian lady is from Singapore and is not very good at using chopsticks.  Cultural lesson #1.

Also noteworthy is that or the several toddlers/kids in the coach, the only one to ever made a noise was the American.

Train system so far mostly straightforward.  If you can decode a DNA sequence, you can probably decipher the Tokyo train map.  Luckily, talk  here English good.  Street maps on the other hand are another story.

Regular maps are pretty straight-forward.  ”You are here” type maps on the street, however, seem to be oriented so that the top of the map is where you are looking, sort of like a navigation GPS.  Then there’s the helpful hotel maps.  The Japanese must understand the confusion we non-Japanese must feel, what with our small brains and big mouths, and feel they must simplify these maps. (American hotels do the same.)  In doing so, they often omit such bewildering data such as street names, and that the map is oriented so that North is the bottom-left corner.  No bother, really… street maps are mostly useless anyway.  Sure, they look impressive with all the street names and district names in nice readable roman characters, but that helps not at all because the actual signposts are only in japanese characters.  Luckily, everyone help vary.

Part Two: ashore

The odd thing so far has been the side streets.  These are alley-sized, but are in fact actual streets and appear on the maps as such, complete with names and sometimes two-way car traffic.  Most traffic on these is pedestrian and bicycle, or was last night.  It’s a bit weird to go from the main streets with traffic and taxis and hubbub and just turn a corner and end up in a street that’s mostly pedestrian and bicycle.  Still hubbub but no (or very few) cars.

People complain about the hotel rooms here, but it’s not much smaller than the W in NYC.  The bar was a bit of a surprise:  the entire outfit was about 10×30, and had a total of 7 or 8 barstools.  But it did have an impressive selection of whiskies and bourbons (most strangely: George Dickel and 2 varieties of Ardbeg), and basic pub fare:  Haggis and miso soup.

The only other patrons were a couple from New Zealand.  I’m sure there are japanese people here somewhere.  I’ll look for some today.

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