Blessed by the Potato

I had some time today to run out and do a bit of shopping in Japan, and also see the famous Kanazawa Geisha district.

I tell you, there aren’t a lot of typical tourist trap stores here. There are plenty to cater to tourists, but they’re filled with expensive gold-plated, or intricate and delicate things that don’t make very good cheap gifts to bring back. I couldn’t even find a simple post-card with a picture of the city, all I saw were Japanese LOLcats.

Almost nobody takes Visa here, and the one place we did find that took it obviously didn’t use it much, because it took two staff members a long time to figure it out.

Prices here are all tax-included as far as I can tell, which helps a fair bit. I took a look at the mini bar price list just to see what it costs, and like all hotels most of the stuff in there is ridiculously priced (300 Yen for a tiny narrow can of Coke that’s maybe 200 mL). Surprisingly, the bottled water was fairly reasonable at 200 Yen (well, reasonable as far as buying bottled water in Canada in a single bottle is; it’s still a really over-priced commodity). So far things do look to be expensive, but less so than they were in Dublin. However, as I think I mentioned earlier, nearly everything is cash-only. We took a small walking tour of the city (we only covered about 1 km x 1 km, which isn’t much) and didn’t see a single bank machine that would take visa, mastercard, interac, plus, or cirrus. We didn’t see any restaurants with credit card logos in the window, either. I think the next step is going to be finding a post office, which I’m told may give cash advances on Visa.

It’s amazing how different the simple things can be between countries, especially on different continents. The trees here are all a bit different, but what really got me is that there’s hardly any grass, mostly just moss grows in open spaces between trees. The space utilization is also intense: the view out the plane and the train showed that no space was wasted. There were hardly any yards around houses, and the very few that did exist were small. Farms and gardens come right up to a house, and rice patties are squeezed into any spare bit of land, even right up next to the rail tracks.

The cars on the road are all almost all a bit different than what we’re used to seeing. I only saw 2 SUVs all day, though there were a number of vans and vehicles that could pass for lowered SUVs — nobody seems to have been fooled into “needing” that much ground clearance. The cars seem to fall into two different categories: really aerodynamic models (lots of Prius, and other cars like that so it doesn’t look so out of place) and really exceptionally boxy ones (likely to maximize interior space).

The washrooms are strange, as hardly any so far have had paper towel or handdryers. I was told a while ago that the custom here is to carry small packets of paper towels/tissues around and to use those to dry your hands — at the conference hall, someone had put out a packet of paper towels for us, as well as a bar of soap: there were no permanent fixtures for either. So perhaps carrying your own soap around is the custom as well?

Anyway, I’m sure at least one of you is itching for photos, so here we go:

We visited a shrine and a famous, very old garden (and a large hilly one at that), and of course had to hit a sushi place and a bar at some point. To get to most of the restaurants we had to wander down these really small, narry, dodgey-looking alleys. We spent a lot of time getting lost in narrow back alleys :) Here’s the entrance to one we went down to get to the bar; trust me, it looks creepier at night:

This is an impressive looking stone support/drainage system for the hill a castle is built on (I first thought it was the castle, since the grove of trees at the top didn’t look large enough to hide one from the road… but it’s really actually a huge hill).

When touring the gardens, we stopped by the pond to get our picture taken. A tour group came up, and had to wait for us while the person we asked to get the shot cycled through about 6 cameras to make sure everyone got a copy. I shot the people waiting instead (yeah, I take weird pictures sometimes):

Then we toured a museum of some sort (I think it was local art and culture from ~1600 to present). I was impressed by the high-tech humidity control devices:

Look! Duck!

So, almost exactly 24 hours after I left my parents house (and about 25 hours since waking up), we finally got to the hotel.

The flight was actually not too bad (bearing in mind that it was a 12-hour flight). We were lucky and didn’t have anyone sitting in the 3rd seat beside us (the plane is laid out in 3 rows of 3), which gave us a lot of room to spread out and get WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos going. The plane, a brand-new Boeing 777, had a bunch of neat amenities to make the flight go a bit better. There was a selection of on-demand movies on the screens in the seat backs in front of us, as well as power outlets for our laptops (2 outlets per 3 seats). Unfortunately, the outlets seemed to have extremely low-amperage breakers, because the power would keep shutting off (there’s a small green light to indicate when the outlet is energized) with my laptop on. I could charge it when it was off though, and Dave had no problem running his non-beastly laptop. With a 12-hour flight even being able to use the laptop for an hour every 3 is a decent compromise (and if I had taken Wayfare up on her offer to take her laptop, I might have done even better). While I’m on the subject of laptops, I should also note that we got the internet in the room working so I can blog and check my email — my STMP server isn’t letting me send any (not a big surprise there), but there’s still webmail for sending. Dave’s using my computer at the moment as well, partly because we only have one ethernet port, and partly because his laptop has a 3-prong grounded plug, whereas all the outlets here are 2-prong ones. It is convenient for the most part, since it’s the same 2 prongs (at the same voltage and roughly the same frequency) that we have in North America, but is unfortunate when you get a 3-prong outlet like that :(

Anyhow, the service on the plane was pretty good. The seats had enough leg room that I wasn’t too cramped (though I would be a bit if I had my bag under the seat in front of me instead on the empty seat beside me — I might have to use the overhead bins for the way back). The flight attendants were all pretty good, and were especially free with the drinks and snacks this time (none of this tiny glass of Coke — they gave me the whole can :) In fact, I find it weird how good Air Canada is once you get in the air, and how actively hostile to their customers they are at the ticketing phase. For instance, their tickets are generally non-refundable, unchangeable (but, for a fee, you can opt to change them, for a second fee, later on… such BS). They didn’t end up getting my request for a veggie meal (the travel agent didn’t seem to put it through right, and I forgot to call AC directly), but when I asked one of the flight attendants for more of the corn chip things, he gave me two big handfuls of them :)

I lost my watch on the plane, it was really strange how it disappeared. I was trying to put it in my pocket, and dropped it down beside the seat near the window. When I had a chance, I got down on the floor and looked around for it (something else that would have been difficult with a 3rd, strange, person in that seat), but couldn’t find it. I figured it went behind me to the next seat back, but when the people back there got off the plane and I went to look, there was no sign of it. Some flight attendants helped look when the plane was empty, and we did everthing including tearing off the velcroed-on seat covers and cushions, with no sign of it. It simply vanished!

After that, we breezed through customs. The lineup wasn’t too bad, and they had absolutely no questions for us other than “anything to declare?” Waiting around on the plane meant we didn’t have to wait for our bags, and went on to the train. That, however, was a bit of a problem. We each had about 20,000 Yen (roughly $200) in cash, which should be plenty for lunches, trinkets, cabs, and the like, and we planned to put everything else (like train tickets) on VISA. Unfortunately, the train only took cash, despite having fancy machine-readable tickets. So, we parted with nearly all our cash, and headed out on what the conference organizers hailed as a 4.5 hour train ride. It came out closer to 6 hours, and would have been over 7 if our plane wasn’t early. Part of the problem is that the BEMs officials, aside from taking glee in torturing their scientists with obscure travel destinations and terrible planning, thought that Nartia airport was actually in Tokyo (from their description, attached directly to the Tokyo train station), rather than having its own train station over an hour away.

The Japanese trains are quite efficient, timely (every station has at least one white-gloved official with a stopwatch), and clean. I found the whole automatic ticket process really confusing though: we got 4 tickets to get from the airport to Kanazawa, an overall fare ticket, as well as a ticket for each train along the way. Different gates wanted different tickets, and combinations of different tickets, and we always got it wrong and have the gate beep and close on us. Then the officials would help us, and take our tickets, and we had to try to ask for them back (to get reimbursed by work). The Shinkansen (bullet train) wasn’t as impressive as I was expecting, at least at first. There weren’t any reading lights or individual air vents, and it didn’t really get up to speed until after we got out of the city (over an hour before we got over 200 km/h by my extremely rough eyeball estimate). The last train in our link, which took over 3 hours, was pretty painful. It was really hot and stuffy, and despite getting a seat in a non-smoking car, someone in there was smoking. It was also pretty noisy and rough — it rocked and jerked up and braked a lot, with a lot of squealing wheels.

Finally, after 24 hours of travelling, we got to our hotel. Checking in was pretty rough — I know my Japanese is worse than their English, but it didn’t make the process any smoother. The hotel has a 1 room, 1 key policy, which is pretty rough with 2 people in a room who are probably going to be attending different talks at different times… a policy that’s made more painful by the fact that everything in the room turns off if the keyplate isn’t left in the slot by the door (so while we’re out, the room gets hot and sticky, and if someone wants to walk off for a bit at night, the other one has to be ready to let him in — if they fall asleep, the one out for a walk might be SOL, but if the one walking takes the key, the one staying won’t have any lights). Dave suggested that we leave the key at the front desk when we go out, and then whoever gets back first could pick it up without worrying… but that seemed like a painful idea to begin with, then we got a call this morning asking for “Mr. Gen” — turns out Gen’s registered to our room, and they have no idea who we are. I don’t think I’ll be handing the key over just yet.

The phone says they charge for local calls, but I wanted to know if that applied to toll-free calls as well (for my calling cards); the front desk had no idea what I was talking about, which is just as well: the phone connection in the room is terrible, so I was better off using the pay phone anyway (I can call out for free from there — at almost $1/min on my phone card).

Things have been pretty quiet out here on PEI, as I would have hoped. I’ve spent a lot of time visiting family and dealing with the slow dial-up connection, and the end of the trip is already looking pretty close…

We went to my aunt’s house for dinner on Saturday, and the directions we got were pretty funny. “Drive past the blue goose [a restaurant], then up a hill. Look for a beige house with newish siding, then turn left. There should be a sign with a seagull on it.” We were laughing in the car thinking there was no way directions like that would properly lead us to a place I’ve only been once or twice before, 20 minutes away… but sure enough we got there no problem, and had to laugh more: those were perfectly adequate directions for PEI!

While there, a big storm rolled up and knocked the power out for a few hours (the power goes out at least once every trip). Right before the lightning hit, we saw a waterspout forming out on the straight. It never got much taller than in the pictures (so the water never joined the clouds), but this one was pretty wide! It’s hard to get an idea of scale from the pictures, but I’d have to guess it was about 300 m across.

We also saw a bald eagle, picture below to come later (probably). My uncle’s camera rocks, by the way.

Still no word on my car, which unfortunately means it’s probably gone for good. I’ll see how life is around London without a car for a few weeks while I look for a new(ish) one. In the meantime, I’ll just have to continue to lob curses and obscenities at the thief, and hope that they get bilateral kidney stones before they can steal another.

PS: is anyone planning on driving from Toronto -> London or points beyond (Windsor?) this weekend? My cat’s being taken care of in Toronto while I’m on vacation, and she can stay there a bit longer if she has to, but I’d prefer to have her back in London with me…

I’ve been very aprehensive about the upcoming conference in Cancun. The hotel where it’s supposed to be at was ravaged by hurricane Wilma, and wasn’t going to open until a month before the conference (from over 7 months before the conference was to start, that’s a lot of time for something to get delayed). The hotel where all the students are staying is owned by the same company and is sited next door, and wasn’t scheduled to reopen until two weeks before the conference started, and even then under “limited services” (I was thinking no room service, others suggested no air conditioning — ouch!). Given all this craziness and uncertainty, I’m surprised we didn’t end up getting a better rate.

As the renovations took place over the winter, we got semi-regular updates about the progress, which stopped about two months ago. The first hotel (the one hosting the actual talks) was supposed to open last week, but we still haven’t heard any word from them. I just checked the website, and its opening has been pushed back to June 1st. The student hotel’s opening date (yep, the one I’m staying at) has been pushed to June 14 — but I’m arriving June 11!

I’ve sent an email to the conference organizers to see what the deal is; I really hope it’s cancelled. I actually shelled out for travel insurance this time around, and am really dreading moving closer to the equator in June.