Welcome To Nippon!

Well, I have finally gotten sat down, uploaded all the pictures, videos, and comments, and am starting this blog! Here I will keep a little journal of what I do in Japan, explaining things about Japan, showing you pictures of everything and even some videos.

IMPORTANT!!!
Bookmark these two sites!
http://picasaweb.google.com/parrott.jason
http://ca.youtube.com/profile?user=Moncader

The first is my pictures album that will and does have ALL my pictures of Japan on it, you can view them in a slide show or just picture by picture. They are arranged by location. Every single picture has a comment explaining the picture. Therefore, I will not be posting all my pictures here on this blog. Instead, if this blog NEEDS to make a reference to a picture, I will point it to my album instead. (There will be a 'click here' kind of thing that you can click on to see it ).

The second is my YouTube homepage, it will have my videos on it. However, unlike pictures, I will probably make links or embed the video right inside this blog. But the above link will give you quick and easy access to a video in case you want to find it again at a later time.

This particular post will be very long... as it's already been 1 week 6 days since I arrived here... But I'll start now.

October 29, 2007 : ２００７年 １０月 ２９日
Today was the day I left Canada. My plane flight left from Vancouver to San Fransisco, transfer planes, and head off to Narita International Airport. Of course, my plane leaving Vancouver was delayed a bit... and I had 20 minutes to run from my arrival gate in San Fransisco to my departure (on the other side of the airport, which was a 13 or so minute walk anyways) gate for Japan. Of course, and obviously, I made it just fine :).
You can find a picture of what the sky looked like that day on my airplaneShots album here.

October 30, 2007 : ２００７年 １０月 ３０日
Since I crossed the international date line... I skipped a day :)
I must say, traveling for 19 hours with no real break sucks... Never done it before, and not looking forward to it again... Especially when the plane that you're on for 10 hours doesn't exactly have a lot of room... I also had a window seat, which I thought was great! However, I soon after takeoff from San Fransisco found out that the Pacific Ocean isn't much to look at ;). I also found out that you have to move 2 other people that just might be sleeping just to get up and stretch or go to washroom or access your backpack. *sigh * Oh well, it's all done now.

I arrived in Japan at 3:30 PM (Japan time now). Met with the people I am staying with (who are, btw, Asako and her sister and parents. Asako is the person I lived with in Burnaby, Canada for several months. Her parents graciously offered their home for me to stay in while I'm Japan. )

Along the drive back to my new home (it took about an hour), I was able to get the first glance of Japan, and the hundreds of differences. The first thing I noticed? The cars are small. Very small. Little things, I'd imagine they are similar in Europe... But later on I found out why they are so small.... They need to fit in to VERY small parking spaces... And they always reverse stall park. Therefore, the backs of the cars are always flat, and quite often, even in parking lots, there are little bars at the back of the stall so that you know when you are just far enough to put it in park (meaning you are supposed to back up IN to the bar :) )
The roads are very small, tight, cramped, and tiny as well. They're 2 lane roads are the same size as our one lane. It was quite scary at first, and for the first while. However, I'm much more at ease with that now.
Of course, everything is backwards as well... You drive on the left side of the road, that was REALLY messing me up when I sit in the front seat.
Of course, everything is in metric in Japan, which is good. An interesting thing is that where in Canada we have signs on the side of the road... quite often in Japan they have 'signs' or just text on the ground, on the pavement.
Traffic lights kinda suck here. They are all time based, not pressure or pedestrian based. This means long waiting times when no one is coming in the other direction.

We stopped at a grocery store to get some groceries first... That was even interesting as I was taller than many of the shelves... and there was no gaijin (foreigners ) anywhere. However, I was happy, as I got my bottled cold green tea. Yup, pop is not nearly as popular as bottled tea of cold coffee here :) You get them in vending machines everywhere (more on that later).

We got home, and I was introduced to my new room (picture here ). I live in Chiba-shi (a Prefecture, or Province), Midori-ku (the city of Midori), Ochi-cho (the 'neighbourhood' of Ochi). In Japanese, if you have Japanese fonts installed on your computer, it looks like this: 千葉市緑区越智著 (If all you see is ??? or a bunch of squares, then you don't have Japanese fonts installed on your computer). You can see all the pictures of Chiba (which is a VERY nice, green, luscious, peaceful and quite place) here. I'm probably the first ever Canadian to set my feet down in Ochi-cho :) Possibly the first ever gaijin (foreigner) to be here.

October 31, 2007 until November 12, 2007 : ２００７年 １０月 ３１日から ２００７年 １１月 １２日まで

Ok, since there has been too many days to remember when everything happened, I'm just going to say everything that happened by location instead of date up until today, which is November 12th, 2007.

Chiba-shi | 千葉市.
Chiba is a wonderful place. Very green, lots of plant life (Bamboo trees for the win!), HUGE bees and very large spiders, birds that sound like they're crying out in pain when they chirp (it's quite scary at first), rice fields everywhere, mountains, rivers, creeks, big fish, nice weather, Disney Land (of which I'm going to soon, on my birthday this Saturday :D ), ancient Buddhist Temples and Shrines.

Chiba is also the location of Narita, the main international airport for Japan, yes, its NOT in Tokyo like most people think.

Chiba is pretty difficult to describe through words actually... It's mostly scenery here, not so much activities that you can do, so head over to the Chiba pictures here. They are all commented and will explain things quite well. (I'm also lazy and I'm itching to do other things, so I'm moving things along quicker :P hehe). Sadly, for some odd reason... youtube won't allow my 2 chiba video's I had to upload. And it's not giving me a reason, just says 'failed'. Great help there. If I can get them to work later, I'll tell you.

Tokyo | 東京.
Tokyo is a very neat place. It's VERY big, VERY busy, and has a VERY efficient transportation system. I'll first point you to the pictures right here. I'd also like to point out right away that yes, while there IS English in Tokyo, especially near or on the train system, there actually aren't very many English speaking people there (at least not publicly). Japan is a Japanese (nihongo or 日本語. Nihon, or Nippon means Japan, adding the go means language, so Nihongo is Japan Language, or Japanese :) ) speaking country, not at all English like lots of people think.
The transportation system is excellent like I said. If you want to go somewhere, anywhere in Tokyo, you can be there with one train ride and either a 3 minute bus ride or 10-15 minute walk (I choose the walking... I like to walk... actually... I've WALKED around most of Tokyo......)
Tokyo is quite smoggy. It's not noticeable when IN Tokyo, but it is when you are flying around it, or up on the skyscrapers at viewing Tokyo from high, like in this video from on top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building:



Apparently, on a clear day, you can see Mount Fuji (藤山) quite well, but not that day :).
Here is a video of that building, but from the ground. It's really big, the videos nor pictures do it justice sadly... I need to find out how to make buildings look big in photos...



Tokyo is divided in to smaller cities or wards. Technically, there is no 'city' Tokyo, just a bunch of wards that make up Tokyo. Tokyo is also the name of the whole Prefecture (province). I've visited most of the wards near the main area of Tokyo, just two left and I'll see those in a day or two. Shibuya is rediculous, as shown in this video:



That was Asako (朝子) at the beginning :) and of course me at the end ;)

Tokyo is quite neat as well in that it's NOT at ALL just cityscape and grey. There are MANY parks, forests, temples, shrines, lakes and streams inside it. Take Mitaka City (once again, a ward of Tokyo) for example, Asako's Grandpa lives there, and we visit there once a week and stay over night on Wednesdays until Thursday. Here are links to some pictures: here, er, and I just realized that I have not taken enough photos of Mitaka... I'll come back and make a post about Mitaka when I go back there again in a few days...

Kamakura is not part of Tokyo, its quite far south of it. I went there with Yumi, who I originally met in Canada as well through Asako. Yumi and I went and saw the whole town (she was my tour guide). Saw several Buddhist Temples and Shrines, a nice beach to open ocean, and just nice scenery all around. There are several pics in the Tokyo album here.

Please look at the rest of the pictures on Tokyo for more explanations of what it's all about. This post is quite long already and I probably shouldn't explain more of whats already explained in the comments of the photos. However, I will point out one last picture...

This one.

Don't you think it looks either not real or from the future? I think so.... it was really neat. That tower belongs to DoCoMo, Japans largest Cell Phone company. Which btw, cell phones are insane here, I'll make another post on that later, when I have my own :) (I applied for alien registration today, and it takes a few weeks to process that, and THEN I can get my phone).

Hope you enjoyed this first post! I'll be posting more often now.... Every few days (I should anyways, now that I've finally started this thing).