Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

This morning started off badly. Storm ("wind", they call it in Tokyo) managed to reduce the amazing mass transit system to a level the Belgian railways might be able to achieve if they work very hard at it for a couple of years. The local train which should run every five minutes on Sunday mornings had about twenty minutes delay and was correspondingly packed. Think "sardines" but slightly less comfortable.

When we finally got to Tokyo station, we discovered that the Narita Express had "undefined" delays. After a bit of me getting very upset at it all, a helpful local pointed us to an alternative train to the airport. It needed very many stops to find the airport, but we got there in the end.

We sailed right through Narita and Kristof was upgraded to the last free comfortable seat on the plane (at the checkin desk next to us, we heard "sorry, business class is full" -- we've all been there).

On the plane, I watched The Killing Fields. An excellent film, but I got some interesting looks from the lady sitting next to me when some of the scenes were a bit too gruesome to ignore. Humans are a pretty crazy species in general, but the Khmer Rouge were particularly nuts.

I think I've flown enough for a bit. Tomorrow I will take it easy to recover from jetlag, but part of "taking it easy" will be queueing at the Russian embassy to sort out my visa. I'm flying to Helsinki in two weeks and taking the train from there to Saint Petersburg. Doing my bit for climate change and all that.

No peace for the wicked.

19:15 JST

Last weekend was AsiaBSDCon. Great stuff as usual. It's always good to see friends from the BSD community again. Again, I focussed more on the hallway track than on the actual conference, but I did catch some good talks. Ana's talk about secure neighbour discovery in particular caught my attention, as did Peter's talk about DNSSEC. Unfortunately, I fear my brain may be too small to understand DNSSEC.

During the conference, Max helped me set up SIP so I can theoretically experience less expensive phone calls when I'm somewhere in the world with wifi. I don't want to think about roaming costs.

Over the weekend, "Neville-Neil Travel Translation Services" helped Brooks, Kristof and me get contiguous seat reservations on a Shinkansen to Kyoto (and beyond). Tasty food in a box on the train, but I snoozed most of the way. Conferences are exhausting.

Sadly, the weather in Kyoto is not cooperating this time round. Rain, rain, rain. Good for culinary tourism, rather less so for sight-seeing. Zen dry gardens are best experienced--well, dry.

Dinner last night followed my usual "get lost first, then hop into the nearest place that smells nice" and was immensely tasty. A combination of teppanyaki and okonomiyaki. I think we confused the staff by getting their "special" as a starter and then continuing with smaller dishes until full. Also sampled a very tasty "unfiltered" sake (bit like sparkling water, lemony) and an entirely (to me) new kind of meat: "hoso". From the sign-language discussion with the waitress, I learned that it's some internal structure of a mammal, but not much more than that. Quite tasty, if somewhat fatty and tendonny.

Sadly, part of the meal was spoiled a bit by a group of annoying tourists complaining about not liking one of the things they ordered and refusing to pay for it. I wanted to switch off my comprehension of English at that point. Or quite possibly hit them with a cluebat. If there's something you don't like, and it's not obviously rotten or "bad", just deal with it and be careful not to order it again next time. I have a (very) short list of things I steer clear from too and I'm practically omnivorous.

This afternoon, we fled back to the city when it started pouring down on our way to a temple. On a whim, we decided that the international manga museum would be an interesting thing to do (it would be dry). Unfortunately, as a museum, the place seems mostly to focus on the building it's in rather than the subject it treats. Also, most of the contents are encrypted in Japanese, which makes me wonder a bit about the "international" part in the name.

There were some interesting English (translations) manga in one room though, and I read Gyo by Junji Ito. If you think H.P. Lovecraft is weird, you haven't seen anything yet. "Weird" doesn't begin to describe it.

If only it would stop raining.

Out for tasty tempura dinner now, I think.

23:56 JST

The weather today was disgusting. Rain, rain rain. Horizontal sheets of water. Really unpleasant.

This morning, we went to see the giant panda at Ueno Zoo, but it turned out that Ling Ling died of a heart attack a couple of years ago. Perhaps I need to rethink my fondness of Japanese cuisine a bit. Happily though, there were many other animals to cover for the disappointment. Particularly interesting was the aye-aye forest. Most of them asleep, but the one or two who were awake were highly entertaining. There was also a hyperactive Galapagos Tortoise, but of course it can't compete with an astro-chelonian.

Pity about the Panda. There's one in the Berlin Zoo I've consistently failed to visit for the past couple of years though. Maybe next year we should visit Berlin a couple of days early and see about the Panda.

Dinner this evening reminded me of why I don't mind sitting in a small metal tube pointed at this island for all too many hours. We spotted the restaurant by the (very!) cute waitress letting out the previous party. It was a tiny place. Three tables only. The kind of place I gravitate to.

Our starter was sashimi, including a bowl of small living fish. I'm actually not sure which fish they were. It was not ikizukuri, which I've had in Kyoto two years ago, but a bowl of small eelish creatures. I understand other people's sensitivities towards things like that, but really - carrots weren't uprooted by choice either, get over it. Just bite once and the vital problem isn't so vital anymore. Also on the plate were uni and some other tasty things. It was realy, really tasty

This was followed by a fried fish and udon and then cold soba. Yum yum!

All this was of course accompanied by some tasty sake.

The cute waitress disappeared at some point, but the food made up for her absence. We have the address of the place, we'll be sure to visit it again.

I asked Sato-san to ask Them to turn off the rain. It seems They have misunderstood though, and it now started snowing. This is suboptimal. I'll have to spend more time in restaurants. I'll end like the Panda, mark my words!

16:49 JST

Hard to believe another year went by. I got back to Tokyo last Friday via Copenhagen. I tried to burn some expiring miles to upgrade Kristof who is travelling with me to business class too, but it turns out they gave him the upgrade without deducting my miles. Very nice. Conversation made the flight over much less boring than usual.

So far, the food is working out very well. Last night, Sato-san recommended us a yakiniku-style establishment in the vicinity of Shinjuku station. The one with 200 exits and millions of people using them all at once. Despite the daunting location, we found it very easily. And the food was scrumptious, as expected.

Earlier today, we met up with the Italian invasion and went to check if Meiji Shrine was still where it was last year. While taking my annual picture of the enormous wooden structure leading to the shrine, a Dutch voice over my shoulder wanted to know if we were sure we could take pictures. Turned out to be Paul and Cor. Bumping into familiar people by accident in a city the size of Tokyo is a bit unexpected. On the other hand ... can't avoid the Dutch, right? ;-)

Food tonight promises to be interesting again. Watch this space!