Stuff and Things

Our last few days have been spent holed up in our room as Hong Kong has just been narrowly missed by a typhoon. Typhoon signal 8 was in force which tends to close down most businesses for the day such as the stock market and urges people to stay indoors.

Of course we had not prepared for this and had no food. So we psyched ourselves up to get out into the pouring and went out… it was actually fairly pleasent. The rain wasn’t too bad and the wind was a huge relief after two weeks of above 30 degrees temperatures. It turned out that this was the tail end of the storm and we weren’t quite as brave as we thought. Later we saw on TV that the worst part was in the night and there had actually been quite a lot of damage caused.

The storm has left us with lots of rain which will certainly mean that our last few days in Hong Kong will be spent in the pub next to our guesthouse watching the Olympics on the big screen… oh well, sounds fun.

Originally uploaded by Louisblack

I haven’t posted for a while so I decided I should probably say hello so that people don’t think that we have been sold into prostitution by triads.

We arrived in Hong Kong on Friday and had to rush to our guesthouse because if we didn’t get there by 10pm, they would let out our room. So we jumped onto the airport express and grabbed a taxi to our guesthouse in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island.

Oh yeah… I completely forgot that I haven’t mentioned the situation with our accommodation in Hong Kong. We were originally meant to stay in the notorious Chungking Mansions. ‘It’ll be an experience’ we naively said as we placed our booking through Hostels.com. We have learnt a few things over the last 2 months. One of which is that we are pretty terrible backpackers. We dislike ‘slumming it’. So when we checked out some recent reviews about the Hong Kong hostel we quickly decided it might not be the best idea to stay there. We managed to get into a guesthouse on Hong Kong Island for around the same price and we are much happier staying here than the more ‘colourful’ Kowloon.

As you can see from the picture, the smog here is awful. We have only had one day of blue skies and the rest have been like the picture. On a plus note we have found ourselves a nice local pub and a local restaurant where we can get two huge bowls on noodle soup with two milkshakes for 68HK$.

I’m just posting quickly to say that I’ve uploaded a few more pictures from Japan to the set of Flickr.

Well, I almost feel like Oliver Twist at the moment. Whilst I really do enjoy Japanese food and I used to happily eat a box of sushi for lunch most days at work and eat at Pompoko every week, when it is your only choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner you start getting a little tired of it.

Jordan and I have spent most of this evening fantasising about sausage and mash, pizza and various other forms of culinary delights.

I should explain. The Japanese really like Japanese food. They are content with eating rice bowls, noodles, yakitori, tempura and various other dishes. There just aren’t the abundance of ethnic restaurants like there is in London, Brighton or even New Zealand and the US. Every restaurant listed in our Rough Guide is Japanese cuisine which has made it really difficult to find anything else as we cannot read the signs and I’m not even going to get into the Japanese address system.

This may be because, from our little experience, the Japanese are not very good at replicating other country’s dishes. We ventured into an Italian restaurant as it was the only one in the area with an English menu. Jordan ended up with the most bizarre minestrone soup and our pizza tasted more like a savoury crepe.

We have decided that tomorrow we will make a concerted effort to find an English restaurant… maybe even a beloved Irish pub to see if we can actually find a completely vegetarian meal (one that Jordan won’t have to spend the meal picking pieces of fish out of).

On a brighter note, we had an excellent night last night at the Kamiya bar where we had giant glasses of Asahi and I ate deep fried squid tentacle. We were also sequestered by several drunk Japanese businessmen who were so excited to see a pair of westerners in the bar that they hummed the British national anthem and tried to buy us beers several times. Of course this was all conducted in Japanese so we were very confused and just kept bowing, nodding and smiling.

And to finish, let me tell you I am currently drinking the weirdest tasting milk I have ever had.

Greetings from the land of the rising sun.

We flew into Tokyo on Thursday night after visiting (briefly) four countries in twenty four hours. We are staying with Dave’s friends who have lived in Tokyo since 2006.

We spent our first day exploring Shinjuku Gyoen, an amazing garden in a traditional Japanese style. We then wondered the streets of Shinjuju for about 30 minutes trying to find the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. This I thought was quite hilarious as it the tallest building in Tokyo by a fair margin. Once we found the thing, we went up to the (free – stupid Sky Tower) observation deck to get a better view of the city. Apparently on a clear day you can see out to Mt. Fuki but it wasn’t a very clear day.

After trying to find a 7/11 shop with any lunchy things left and wondering into a closed restaurant causing much apologising and bowing we decided that Shinjuku is probably a little too busy around lunch time. For lunch we decided to take the train to nearby Harajuku where we could sit and eat in the park… although it did start raining straightaway.

We decided to brave going to a bar in the evening as we both were craving beer. The original plan was to get food too but the bar we found ourself in had a menu with very few pictures and was exclusively in Kanji (the symbols). We finally found somewhere to eat with nice easy english descriptions but it just happened to be an Italian restuarant… now the Japanese have an interesting take on Italian food. The pizza was bizarre but very tasty.

Today we got up and headed out to an animation museum out to the west of the city. The website had a fairly awful map and our Rough Guide didn’t provide a great description of it’s location so we stood looking bemused in front of a map at the station. This of course attracted much attention from concerned travellers. One man asked if we needed help and looked over the map to see if there was anything written in Japanese that would help. As this did not uncover any useful information and he did not know where the museum was himself he charged off to find someone who did know. After about five minutes he came back and said he could not find anything useful and the look of sorrow on his face that he could not help was quite moving. It’s definitely different from England where no one would offer to help a tourist and certainly not to that extent.

Anyway, after much walking we found the musuem which was actually a lot smaller than we would have hoped and we got round it very quickly. I did get to play with a 5 foot tall Gundam robot though!

As I expected, so far Tokyo has been the most amazing place. I have wanted to visit this city since I was a child watching films like Akira when other kids were watching Disney. We have a great deal planned over the next two weeks so I’ll hopefully add to what I’ve already uploaded on Flickr.