Time goes fast in Tokyo

Hi!

I was planning on updating this blog tonight, but time flew by as I was trying to get the computer to work, and now it's past midnight and we're supposed to go to Tsukiji at 6 o'clock tomorrow (today).

We went to Harajuku and Shibuya today, and the Senso-ji temple yesterday. And since I'd rather sleep than blog, you'll have to wait on the info and pictures.

See you and good night!

June 6th

Hi!

Today we managed to wake up a bit earlier, yet still not so early as preferred. It's 11:21 now, and Jonas is showering. We plan on going out and doing some more "touristy" things today, visiting the huge temple here in Asakusa at least.

Yesterday we went to sleep at 02:20ish. We didn't really do anything yesterday since we woke up so late. We did eat some tasty ramen though.
Everything is really cheap here compared to back home. I mean, the ramenbowl here only took me back 580 Yen (which is something like 3,7 euros), and it's quite a lot of food, Jonas didn't even finish his order. So it fills your stomach at least. The

first pic is mine, the second is Jonas.

It's rather annoying transferring pictures to this blog, since I have to do it directly from my camera. This computer only has something like 215kb free memory, so it's not enough space for even one picture. But at least it works, only takes a bit longer.

Oh, and we went to a bar yesterday: it was a three-story French wine-pub. I bought a Gin & Tonic and Jonas a Vodka-Grape. The glasses we got was not your normal Highball: it was a normal big drinking-glass! Like, 0,4 liters or something! And it was very strong too. Because I finished my drink earlier than Jonas, I ordered another one. This time, a watermelon liqueur with soda (very macho, I know). That came in a normal size though, and it was actually really good, when you mixed the soda with the liqueur, it tasted as I would guess carbonated water with watermelon would taste. Tasty.

We visited a Hyaku-en (100 Yen shop) shop yesterday as well, where you can buy a lot of stuff for basically nothing (100 Yen = 0,64 euros). And it's not just crap as you'd think, it's stuff that makes you angry about living on the Aland Islands. Just some examples; a perfectly good screwdriver, pens, notebooks, everything one can need in a kitchen (knives, bowls etc.), computer peripherals, a lot of babystuff, and even food! So we each bought ourselves a pedometer. It's quite fun to watch how many steps you've taken in a day. We bought them rather late in the evening, so I only took 5700 steps or so. Jonas didn't get his to work proper, apparently we walks too smooth, because it doesn't register his steps. When I wear his, it works for me!

Anyhoo, maybe not so fun to read about every little notion of our lives, so I'll just add a bunch of pics after this. Enjoy!

Day 2, Thursday

Hello everyone, I'm sitting in our hostel and writing this at 18:38. And we still haven't gone outside.

That's because we didn't want to go to sleep so early yesterday, since we didn't want to mess with our awake/sleep routine (vad ar egentligen dygnsrytm pa svenska?). So we went out at around 21:30 and was planning to just walk around for an hour or so, but then we saw some cool stuff, and it wasn't so crowded, so went on for a while longer. Then, we found this massive arcade, with a scaring amount of awesome games. To name a few; Half-Life 2: Survivor, Silent Hill Arcade (which we played together, very scary and incredibly intense), Mario Kart and of course all the latest Tekken, Virtua Fighter and so on. It also had a massive screen (maybe 80'', although widescreenformat), which you could play some Gundam-game on. Looked really cool. The weirdest game though was a huge screen (maybe 160'') with maybe 25 chairs turned to it (all the chairs were like electronic loungesystems, TV-screens and everything), and it was a horseracing-simulator. Must be hugely popular in Japan since it took up almost an entire normal-siced room.

Anyhow, after we spent a couple hundred Yen there, we started going home, and since we got a bit lost it took us a while. So we ended up going to sleep just before 3:00.. And we woke up at 16:20! I accidentaly pressed "Stop" instead of "Snoose".. But we have a pretty good excuse I think. I mean; we had travelled half-around the world and walked quite a bit.

And it's not so bad, it's raining today, so we don't really want to walk around so much. We're planning to go out and eat something now, probably ramen. And then walk around windowshopping a bit I guess.

Oh, and I tried sending an e-mail from my phone with a picture, and it worked. Here it comes, see you!

The Journey Begins

Hello everybody!

Both flights were great (first from Arlanda to Helsinki, then Helsinki to Narita Tokyo). On the second flight we even had our own personal entertainment system! It had a bunch of movies, TV-shows and so on. We watched the movie Jumper, then Going By the Book (a funny Korean flick) and lastly I watched Juno, which I thought was amazing.





Now we are sitting in our Hostel tired something fierce. Jonas can't even keep his eyes open during the time it takes to write this. Tokyo is truly a very odd city, we have only seen a fraction of Asakusa as of yet, but it is still full of weird people and monuments. Also next to a shopping-street full of expensive objects, one finds shrines and monks wandering about.








Well, that's all from us this time, we will try and update as often as we have enough willpower.

See you!
















-Christoffer & Jonas

Backpack

This is my backpack, jammed full o' goodies. It´s current weight is 15,7kg (that´s 34,6 pounds for you non-metric folks). I have two beers from our local brewery in it that we are going to bring to an American living in Osaka to whom my father is acquainted with. He owns a pub (I think), so he wants to sample different beers from around the world.

They have some weight to them, so I can´t wait to get rid of them honestly.

Anyhow, I will try and blog from my japanese cellphone when we get there, since it´s evidently available from this site. Can´t wait.

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog about Japan!
Our names are Christoffer and Jonas, we will write in english even though we are from Finland and talk swedish, and it´s mainly our own relatives and friends who are going to read it. But still, more people can read it if we write in english, hence the choice.

Anyhoo, we don´t know how often we will update this blog, but we will at least try as often as possible. I somehow think we will have other things on our minds (none of us have been to Japan before, and we are somewhat in love with the country, i.e. nerds).

And another thing; I (Christoffer) have never blogged before, or in fact written anything on a regular basis, so if you think anything´s badly written or that we could do better in any way; eh, we don´t really care. The only thing this blog really does is to show & tell about our (hopefully) awesome journey to Japan.
Please comment though, and if you want us to write about something special, or take a pic of anything; please just ask. We can probably do it. The only part of Japan we won´t go to is Okinawa, since it´s friggin' expensive.

Our flight is from Arlanda, Sweden on tuesday the 3rd, so I don´t think we will write anything more before we get to the country in question.

Have a good time, and we´ll be back!

/Christoffer (&Jonas)