Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

23:37 JST

Met up with Claudio very early this morning to make our way to the Imperial Palace in good time to register for the 10:00 tour. The Lonely Planet mentioned we'd need our passports, but it was overly pessimistic about the waiting times. We arrived at 09:20 and were able to participate in the 10:00 tour.

The Palace is very spectacular. It's really a pity you're not allowed to go into the buildings. The walk in the beautiful garden really makes up for that though.

I managed to get the pictures off the wonky SD card I blogged about yesterday. It turns out the dcim directory doesn't really look like a directory and the kernel doesn't like that. The camera seems to keep a pointer straight to the pictures though, so it doesn't have a problem with this. I used gphoto2 to get the pictures off the camera. I've saved a dd of the card to try to figure out what happened to that directory.

Unfortunately, I'm a bit too tired to upload some pictures tonight. I'll deal with that tomorrow!

After a long stroll through the Imperial Palace garden, we walked on to Nijō Castle. This is the one that's always used in books and films about paranoid Japanese warlords. The floorboards really sing like nightingales and the fortifications are impressive. Like the Imperial Palace, Nijō-jo also has a fantastic garden. Zen gardeners must have worked cheap in the 17th century!

Lunch were hot udon noodles with tempura shrimp in a small place in a narrow shopping street. The usual trick "look for the locals" worked again. We chose to sit at a table since I'd not entirely recovered from last night's tatami research session.

Then off to see the Golden Pavilion, which must be the most-photographed temple in the world. I took about twenty pictures of it. It's hopelessly difficult to take pictures of. What with idiots such as myself walking in front of cameras all the time. Damn and blast tourists! :-) Again, you'll have to wait a bit for the pictures.

We tried to synchronize with Soren and Christoph for dinner, but failed. I have a feeling we'll succeed tomorrow!

Claudio found an interesting tempura place in the Lonely Planet, somewhere in Gion. When we got there, we were seated on "cheat" tatami (with a pit for legs and feet) and discovered that the people around the counter with us were three American MathWorks employees who work on MATLAB and two French tourists accompanied by a French friend of theirs who lives in Tokyo. The two locals who were also around the counter disappeared too quickly for introductions.

It turns out that we all used the Lonely Planet as our guide, and four copies of it were on the counter. I really should have taken a picture of that!

Now off to bed. Email from Soren seems to suggest that we'll manage to sync up tomorrow for dinner at least. We'll see if we manage it. The lack of real-time means of communication is really annoying here. In all other respects, I rather like the fact that my mobile phone is off. It feels strangely liberating. I dread the moment I get to switch it on in Copenhagen. I bet it's going to beep for twenty straight minutes with missed calls and messages.