Where to start?<\/p>\n
Well yesterday morning we got up at about 6am. It was not fun. We had a
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quick breakfast and headed into Shinjuka to catch a bus to Kawaguchi.
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Shinjuka is one of the newest and most modern areas of Tokyo. It was in fact
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part of the inspiration for Bladerunner<\/i>. Photos to come. Getting
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there involved taking the subway during rush hour. Until now, I would have
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taken the subway here over London any day. Everything is clean and runs
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exactly on time. Well rush hour is a different story. There are<\/b>
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people employed to stand on the platforms at the train doors and to push
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people in. We were quite lucky in that we got on an empty train not due to
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leave for another five minutes. Just before it did, it packed up and trust
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me you don’t know the meaning of the phrase packed up until you have seen
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this. And just when I thought no-one else could get on, the queue was pushed
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onto the train.<\/p>\n
Kawaguchi is one of the ‘Fuji Five Lakes’ at the base of Fuji-san. W It took
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about 2.5 hours to get there by bus, not even Tokyo is exempt from road
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works. We drove through some absolutely stunning countryside. I have never
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Autumn look better than it does here. The trees are just stunning. We
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basically drove through the mountains for over an hour and it was all woods
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everywhere you looked.<\/p>\n
Anyways we got there and after some trouble sorted out tickets for
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everything we wanted. Well that’s not true exactly. It is out of season and
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we were not able to get anywhere near to the mountain itself. Even the first
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few camps were closed. A disappointment but not entirely unexpected. So we
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had a boat trip around the lake and then took the Ropeway (cable car) to the
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top of a nearby mountain and took some photos.<\/p>\n
After another bit of just wandering around we grabbed a bus back into Tokyo.
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This was a little more of a scenic route and it drove about half way around
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Fuji-san giving us some more views of it and of a couple of the other lakes.<\/p>\n
We got back into our hotel shortly after 8. We were both completely and
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utterly shattered. We had been planning to go out with my sister and some of
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her friends. Nothing starts in Tokyo till well late. We had provisionally
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arranged to meet at midnight and take it from there. The earliest you can
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get home from a night out is around 5am when the trains kick off again. Well
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anyway we weren’t up for it.<\/p>\n
There is of course a ‘however’ at this stage. I was lying on my bed just
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relaxing, glad to have a load off my feet and the line of thought was to
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never move again. The other line of thought was along the lines of ‘Fuck it.
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I am in Tokyo and it is a Friday night. I don’t care how tired I am. I am
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going out for the night’.<\/p>\n
So I did. I rang my sister and arranged to meet up with her. We met in
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Shibuya. This is the going out district for the Japanese (and the gaijin in
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the know). We started off in the a bar called the Lime House. You order some
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food and get a drinks menu with it. You pay something like 1000 Yen (the Y
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is silent by the way, it is actually pronounced ‘en’ with not much of the
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‘e’. ) This works out to be about \u00a35 for a hour. Given that drinks include
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pitchers of beer and Jim Beam whiskey, this worked out well. This is also
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the spot for students to hang out, and the place was filled with mainly
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foreign students. Mairead knew quite a few of them and we ended up with a
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group of people.<\/p>\n
Then we moved on, a club called Fai was doing a 70’s night and it was cheap
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in with some drinks included in the price. We arrived there and stayed till
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about 4am. It wasn’t bad at all. I did find it amusing to be in a night club
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in Tokyo on a Friday night dancing to Abba and Michael Jackson, but hey!<\/p>\n
When we finished there, we hit a 24 hour restaurant kinda place for some
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quick food and coffee for me. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. I had sit
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down in the club at one stage, closed my eyes and I was asleep. Then just
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after 5 off to the train station and back to the hotel. I stood on the train
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and not once, but three times did I fall asleep. If I had not been holding
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on to a handle on the roof, I would have fallen over. It was not good.
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Anyways back to the hotel around 6am and slept for about 6 hours.<\/p>\n
The photos have been resized hence the lower quality. Galleries with high
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quality to come when I get back to London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Where to start? Well yesterday morning we got up at about 6am. It was not fun. We had a quick breakfast and headed into Shinjuka to catch a bus to Kawaguchi. Shinjuka is one of the newest and most modern areas of Tokyo. It was in fact part of the inspiration for Bladerunner. Photos to … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davebushe.net\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}