{"id":967,"date":"2006-12-13T11:15:24","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T15:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2006\/12\/13\/tokyo-part-iii-the-return\/"},"modified":"2006-12-13T11:27:25","modified_gmt":"2006-12-13T15:27:25","slug":"tokyo-part-iii-the-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2006\/12\/13\/tokyo-part-iii-the-return\/","title":{"rendered":"Tokyo, Part III: The Return"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m home! Unfortunately, things didn’t get better for Randy the last few days of the trip. After puking up a storm on Friday, he remained sick on Saturday and Sunday. However, unwilling to waste his last remaining hours in Tokyo, he bravely ventured into the city (and into nearly every public restroom) as we continued to explore the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Ebisu, Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ueno Park.<\/p>\n

The flight home was uneventful, aside from some religious freak across the aisle who actually paid\u00a0for an extra seat so he could place his statue of the virgin Mary next to him on the flight. Making matters worse, he even kept the overhead light on her (as a spotlight) for the entire flight. Randy took photos of it, and I’ll post a copy here once it’s been downloaded.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, here are my final observations of Japan:<\/p>\n

Japan is the most efficient country I can imagine. You can go to a restaurant, find a plastic display of the food you want, go to a vending machine (also with photos of the food), pay for your item, grab a ticket, hand it to the cook and they will prepare the food for you. You don’t have to speak to anybody or know the language! Fast food even faster!<\/p>\n

Japan has foliage to rival New England. Hell, it might even be better.<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

Japan is leaps and bounds ahead of us when it comes to infrastructure. Instead of highways and train tracks going around gigantic mountains, they just drill a hole through the mountain and make it a straight shot. Their idea of high speed trains is much different that America’s lame-ass excuse of the Acela train from Boston to Washington, DC (which is slow, unreliable and has to deal with at-grade street crossings).<\/p>\n

Paris, France, should not be known as “the City of Lights”. I mean, yeah, Paris lights up it’s monumental buildings elegantly at night. But Japan lights up EVERYTHING at night. Hell, they even have their own replica of the Eiffel Tour! There’s neon as far as the eye can see in Kyoto, Tokyo, Osaka…and all towns in between. The only areas left un-touched are the mountains (where it’s presumably too difficult to develop….yet)<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

Japan has heightened personal hygiene. I mean, I found a public toilet that had a heated seat, a bidet function, a white-noise function\u00a0(so others can’t hear you) and a fan (to remove odors). This was all built into the actual toilet! Did I also mention that they have full height toilet partitions?<\/p>\n

On the other hand, they’re hygience can be quite questionable at times. I’ve never seen so many people pick their noses in public in my life. I’m not talking subtle pickings here…I’m talking digging for gold.<\/p>\n

The Japanse concept of breakfast is simply scary: here’s a photo of breakfast our final day in Tokyo. What wasn’t pictured (because I didn’t want to eat any) were the boiled hot dogs and gruel. Broccoli, sphagetti and bacon, and salad, anyone?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Japan<\/p>\n

That said, here are the remaining photos from Tokyo. Despite Randy getting sick, it was truly an adventure for me. I’d definitely go back – focusing more time on Kyoto…and possibly visiting Hiroshima and southwest Japan.<\/p>\n

We stumbled upon this sign at a restaurant. What does it mean? No smoking, sneezing\u00a0and drinking elephants allowed?<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

Yet another temple-like structure in Ueno Park<\/p>\n

\"Japan<\/p>\n

A view from the top of City Hall (which is over 45 floors tall!)<\/p>\n

\"Japan\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m home! Unfortunately, things didn’t get better for Randy the last few days of the trip. After puking up a storm on Friday, he remained sick on Saturday and Sunday. However, unwilling to waste his last remaining hours in Tokyo, he bravely ventured into the city (and into nearly every public restroom) as we continued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}