BURASTO OFFU!
Well, here I am, sitting in my little box in Solana Beach. The bleach in my hair (and on one of my eyebrows...?) hurts a bit. Typical of my impulsive nature, I've decided to lighten up a few blotches on my head. I'll fit right in when we get to Harajuku.
Chris and I'll be going up to his folks' place in the OC tonight -- my little hair misadventure had better find resolve before Chris arrives... Anyway, We'll need to be at LAX around 10 tomorrow morning, so I guess that means we'll be getting up early. Dangit. Now, getting up early in Japan is something else altogether -- I won't want to miss a thing, and since we'll often be staying at capsule hotels, I'll wanna make sure I have time for some sauna action and whatnot before we have to check out.
Our itinerary is quite fleshed out now. We may even need to be acting with some sort of automatic celerity -- good thing we'll be let loose in a locus of Zen.
Tomorrow: takeoff at 12:30p. The flight's generally something like 11 hours. I'll be happy if I can manage to sleep for four hours or so; I actually wouldn't want to sleep much more, as I have a pretty ambitious list of things to do throughout the trip:
- finish reading Year of the Dolphin (the author of which I should be meeting up with!).
- read Dogs and Demons
- read Zen
- learn Icelandic (yeah, while I'm in Japan, shaddup!)
- study some Japanese (duh!)
- write poems/possible song kernels for upcoming publication
- blog a ton!
... and so on.
We'll arrive at Narita Airport around 4pm on May 15th -- mhmm, we lose a whole day between the flight and the time zones. This means we won't arrive in Tokyo proper until perhaps 6:30pm, and I plan to keep us underground until our grand emergence into a penombre-bathed neon-accosted Shibuya. We'll have enough time to foot it a bit, grab some dinner, and hopefully some drinks before we'll need to get serious about finding a capsule. That is, of course, if I don't keep Chris out all night at some arcade.
The 16th is when things'll get hyphy, fo sho. I am very, very eager to meet with a very busy man named George Plamantouras, who is very much up on his TurboGrafx/PC-Engine stuff. (That's nerdy hardcore classic video games, for the uninitiated.) He's also the author of Year of the Dolphin, which I haven't quite finished -- but it's had me in stitches at times, often nodding my head in agreement. I can also empathize greatly with his penchants for compulsion/thrift/travel/disa ster. I know he won't be able to meet until the 18th or so, if he's able to meet me at all.
I believe on the 20th I will have the wonderful fortune to meet up with Christian, a fellow alumnus of the Japan in Today's World program (at KyuDai, where I studied abroad). It seems he and some others are now in the Tokyo area, working on graduate studies or perhaps holding down teaching jobs.
(Wow, the bleach looks crazy! Now for toner!)
The 21st, 22nd, and 23rd will be split, I think, between two fellow UCSD chaps, Daniel Watts (creator of the Nintendo video featured in the last post), and fellow ex-Sierra Summit maestro Ramon Celosia (creator of general awsum). They both live in Chiba.
Besides these planned meetings, we have a bit of a list of places to go. I suppose that means the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and some of the 20th are the days to not only see Tokyo, but (unless we accede to such trivia as physics and its accompanying notions of time) see:
- Yokohama
- Kamakura
- Kawasaki (c'mon, there's a penis shrine there!)
- Enoshima
- Takasaki (a chance to Shinkansen it up, from Omura station)
... jeez. We'd better have some serious green tea to caffeinate our intrepid fandango.
I'm tempted to stay the final night, the 23rd, at a youth hostel in Narita, so that we might actually see some of Narita itself rather than just blazing through it en route to the airport.
Things I simply must do while there:
- sell an American video game at a game store
- mad arcade action (duh)
- karaoke
- sell my Starbucks shirts for some spending money at a recycle shop
- send postcards!
- kick some ass at UFO Catchers (skill cranes)
- eat late-night markdown supermarket dinner
- eat at a yatai
- go cafe hopping! (esp. at Caffe Veloce for cheapies)
- eat namashirashi in enoshima
- eat taiyaki
- buy some fireworks! (I should try to mail them home.)
All on a shoestring budget, eh? And what's worse: I'm out of shape. Which'll likely mean I'll actually want MORE food and less movement. I need to shake that possibility right now. *huffpuff*
If I don't make another entry before the flight -- I'll write from Tokyo!
YOSHI!
Chris and I'll be going up to his folks' place in the OC tonight -- my little hair misadventure had better find resolve before Chris arrives... Anyway, We'll need to be at LAX around 10 tomorrow morning, so I guess that means we'll be getting up early. Dangit. Now, getting up early in Japan is something else altogether -- I won't want to miss a thing, and since we'll often be staying at capsule hotels, I'll wanna make sure I have time for some sauna action and whatnot before we have to check out.
Our itinerary is quite fleshed out now. We may even need to be acting with some sort of automatic celerity -- good thing we'll be let loose in a locus of Zen.
Tomorrow: takeoff at 12:30p. The flight's generally something like 11 hours. I'll be happy if I can manage to sleep for four hours or so; I actually wouldn't want to sleep much more, as I have a pretty ambitious list of things to do throughout the trip:
- finish reading Year of the Dolphin (the author of which I should be meeting up with!).
- read Dogs and Demons
- read Zen
- study some Japanese (duh!)
- write poems/possible song kernels for upcoming publication
- blog a ton!
... and so on.
We'll arrive at Narita Airport around 4pm on May 15th -- mhmm, we lose a whole day between the flight and the time zones. This means we won't arrive in Tokyo proper until perhaps 6:30pm, and I plan to keep us underground until our grand emergence into a penombre-bathed neon-accosted Shibuya. We'll have enough time to foot it a bit, grab some dinner, and hopefully some drinks before we'll need to get serious about finding a capsule. That is, of course, if I don't keep Chris out all night at some arcade.
The 16th is when things'll get hyphy, fo sho. I am very, very eager to meet with a very busy man named George Plamantouras, who is very much up on his TurboGrafx/PC-Engine stuff. (That's nerdy hardcore classic video games, for the uninitiated.) He's also the author of Year of the Dolphin, which I haven't quite finished -- but it's had me in stitches at times, often nodding my head in agreement. I can also empathize greatly with his penchants for compulsion/thrift/travel/disa ster. I know he won't be able to meet until the 18th or so, if he's able to meet me at all.
I believe on the 20th I will have the wonderful fortune to meet up with Christian, a fellow alumnus of the Japan in Today's World program (at KyuDai, where I studied abroad). It seems he and some others are now in the Tokyo area, working on graduate studies or perhaps holding down teaching jobs.
(Wow, the bleach looks crazy! Now for toner!)
The 21st, 22nd, and 23rd will be split, I think, between two fellow UCSD chaps, Daniel Watts (creator of the Nintendo video featured in the last post), and fellow ex-Sierra Summit maestro Ramon Celosia (creator of general awsum). They both live in Chiba.
Besides these planned meetings, we have a bit of a list of places to go. I suppose that means the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and some of the 20th are the days to not only see Tokyo, but (unless we accede to such trivia as physics and its accompanying notions of time) see:
- Yokohama
- Kamakura
- Kawasaki (c'mon, there's a penis shrine there!)
- Enoshima
- Takasaki (a chance to Shinkansen it up, from Omura station)
... jeez. We'd better have some serious green tea to caffeinate our intrepid fandango.
I'm tempted to stay the final night, the 23rd, at a youth hostel in Narita, so that we might actually see some of Narita itself rather than just blazing through it en route to the airport.
Things I simply must do while there:
- sell an American video game at a game store
- mad arcade action (duh)
- karaoke
- sell my Starbucks shirts for some spending money at a recycle shop
- send postcards!
- kick some ass at UFO Catchers (skill cranes)
- eat late-night markdown supermarket dinner
- eat at a yatai
- go cafe hopping! (esp. at Caffe Veloce for cheapies)
- eat namashirashi in enoshima
- eat taiyaki
- buy some fireworks! (I should try to mail them home.)
All on a shoestring budget, eh? And what's worse: I'm out of shape. Which'll likely mean I'll actually want MORE food and less movement. I need to shake that possibility right now. *huffpuff*
If I don't make another entry before the flight -- I'll write from Tokyo!
YOSHI!
