I Am Not Jeff

In the morning, we visited the Imperial Palace. No one is allowed to go in, so we were only able to take pictures of the front gates and a statue of this one Shogun located in the park in front of the castle. Here a few pictures, including one of the Tokyo skyline.

Noontime: We visited the Asakusa Shrine and the traditional shopping district in front of it. The shrine was built when two brother fishermen found a golden statue in the local waters. On the temple grounds, there were these booths where you could buy fortunes or ill omens. A lot of Buddhist temples in Japan seem to have these fortune shops. There were a lot of people there. A lot of the shops were geared towards tourists but the further you ventured away from the shrine, the more the shops catered to Japanese natives. I bought a traditional Japanese hand towel. I also bought some really delicious iced green tea.

For lunch, we ate a kamemeshi steamed rice dish. This is the kind of food you'll never see in the US. It came with traditional Japanse tofu and ginger. It was a good meal, but light on the tastebuds.

After lunch, we visited the Ginza shopping district. This is one of the high class shoppng districts in Japan. However, the only thing we bought was Japanese jelly desserts from a department store. In addition, we visited the Sony gallery, where their latest technologies and products are on display. There were a lot of cool computer monitors in there. Alas, we didn't have enough time to explore the entire gallery.

Afterwards, we went to visit the Meiji Shrine. It was built to honor the emperor who started the Meiji Restoration. Near the shrine, there is this tree where people go to post their wishes. Interestingly, a good number of them were written in English. Each wish cost 5 yen and a monk would also pray for the wish. People were allowed to wish for many things, including getting into Tokyo U. Sound familiar, you anime otaku?

By night time, we visited the Shinjuku District of Tokyo. This district is probably the busiest area in Tokyo. In this area, you could see a lot of Japanese youth with their fob punk fashion styles. They all look so similar because they all wore the same style of clothes.

For dinner, we went to the Keio department store to buy several bento to take back to the hotel room. They sold some really good tempura and sushi. In these department stores, they sell a huge variety of bento. There was everything from hamburg steaks to sukiyaki to fish cakes to beautiful cakes.

In the hotel, I found proof of how Japanese people like to demonstrate things with cartoons.

The first thing I see out the window on the descent to Narita International Airport is a lot of dark green trees--forests--something you don't see too often in California.

I hear Narita is a relatively new airport. I must say that the architecture is a lot nicer compared to LAX. LAX is old, outdated, and in serious need of renovation. In LAX, you'll see ceiling boards missing, nasty brown walls, and yea.....architectural nightmare. Back to Narita....

As expected, there were long airport security clearance lines at LAX. I suppose it can't be helped. Well, after checking in our luggage, me and my family went to the food court upstairs on the Tom Bradley International Airport. Airport food is ridiculously expensive. $8.00 for a 3 item Chinese combo meal. $2.00 for a bottle of water. My goodness.

Afterwards, we went through passenger screening. There was this cranky lady security guard supervising all of the travelers going through the metal detector. She gave directions to all of the travelers with an air of annoyance, frustration, impatience, and little sympathy. She must have been working there WAY too long. I bet she had to deal with confused and angry travelers at one point and turned apathetic like that.Boarding onto Singapore Airlines to go to Narita was slightly delayed. Anyways, the captain pilot had the craziest English accent ever. It sounded so sophisticated, energetic, and confident. Perfect English. And guess what? He was Chinese too. Way to go on breaking Chinese-people-can't-speak-English stereotypes.

Most of the people on the flight were Japanese except for a few others like me. I'm fairly impressed the flight used both English and Japanese on the safety explanations. Also, there were a good number of Japanese speaking flight attendants. Impressive, considering that English is the official language of Singapore. They must have some great customer service to break language barriers between attendants and passengers like that.

What are my impressions of Singapore Airlines? Well, I sat in economy class, so I won't be able to explain the wonders of their first class seating. But even for economy class, there was a LCD screen in front of EVERY seat. They offered close to 80 in-flight movies along with hundreds songs from an international selection. They also offered one episode for a variety of TV shows. AND they had games you could play on the screen including Super Mario. All of these services come with the ticket price. I spent the flight watching Shooter, Letters From Iwo Jima, and The Seven Samurai. Brilliant entertainment service.

An addition, the stewardesses give you free socks for overnight flights.

For the in-flight dinner, I ate Japanese pickled vegetables, a dinner roll, soba noodles with wasabi, teriyaki salmon, and Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. Pretty good. There was also lunch but I forgot what that was.