more random thoughts/observations from our trip...

Hi! So we've finally posted our pics of our trip onto Picasa:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ponophobic

Making captions for all the photos is hard and time consuming, especially since I can't remember what some of the buildings are, which explains why some of the captions only say "another building on the temple grounds." Anyway, take a look at them and leave comments if you feel compelled to.

So back to what this post is supposed to be about--more stuff about our trip:

1) Melons are expensive. Ok, so I guess melons might not be that easy to grow in Japan because the prices for them are insane. There was this small watermelon at a grocery store that was selling for around $9. And if you thought that was expensive, there is this one variety of melon that is insanely pricey, the Yubari Melon. So we're not sure what's so special about this melon, but everywhere we go, we always see them selling for at least 10,000 Yen (roughly $85-90). And then there was this one store that was selling a pair of them for 41,000 Yen. What's even crazier is this article. Seriously, 2 million yen?!?!? We were tempted to buy one just to see what the fuss was about, but we resisted.

2) Vending machines are awesome! So yeah, Japan has tons of vending machines, and there are some bizarre ones out there. Unfortunately, we just saw a lot of drink vending machines, sometimes a cigarette machine as well, but that was about it. But the most interesting one that we encountered was on the Ramen floor of the Kyoto Station (yes, they have a ramen floor). We wandered around the floor from one ramen place to another, and when we were ready to go in and order, we wondered why each store had a vending maching near their entrance. We realized that to order food, you actually used the vending machine! So each button on the vending maching corresponds to a menu item, and the menu was a display of plastic versions of the dish. The place that we went to went a step further and actually numbered each item in the display so that each button corresponded to the display number, so that people who couldn't really read Japanese could still order based on what the food looked like. After you pressed the buttons for your order, the machine would print out a ticket for each item, and then you'd take all of them and hand them over to someone who was standing by the entrance...and that was it. We sooooo appreciated the ease of ordering there.

3) Kyoto taxi drivers. So we decided to take a taxi from our hotel in Kyoto to Kyoto station. This would be our first taxi ride, and we didn't know what to expect. First of all, many of the cars in Japan are small, including the taxis, and the reason for this became obvious very quickly...the roads in Kyoto are narrow!!! Our driver decided to avoid main streets in order to get to the station, so this basically meant that we would be travelling on streets that would be considered a one lane road, but was actually a two lane road. The driver wasn't worried that at one point, there were two poles on either side of the street, and in order to avoid them, he needed to slalom...no, he just kept his 30 km/h speed down the road. If a car was coming at him...just keep going and swerve to the side if absolutely necessary. We probably shouldn't complain too much about it since he did get us to the station in a short amount of time, but really, it was crazy and impressive at the same time.

4) The MTV Japan Music Awards. We happened to be in Japan during this, and we happened to catch a piece of it on Japanese TV. The one moment that we remember very vividly is this one male celebrity, most likely a singer, come out on stage and greet the crowd in English with, "Are you exciting?!?!" He was very ecstatic about this...and he continued with "I'm so exciting!!!!" And that was your piece of Engrish for the day :)

I think there's more to talk about, but I'll stop here for now.

Jerry Liu