Dolphins From My Window

I see dolphins from my hotel window. :)

Fugu Dinner

Two of us left Tokyo for Sweden this morning. Alex and I were left. We said good-bye to our Japanese colleagues around 5:30 PM today and went straight to Ginza for some shopping. I bought some very cute pink chino shorts. :)

We were recommended a Fugu restaurant near the Ginza area, so we went to that place for a late dinner. It was fun to have tried it, but it really is nothing special with the taste. It taste like chicken.

Here is the menu and the different courses.

Top Of Shinagawa

Work, work, work...

After our yakiniku dinner we got an e-mail from a Japanese colleague that he got the thing that we have been working on the whole week running. Great!

We continued the night going to the bar at 39th floor of the hotel. We sat there till quite late - maybe 1:30 AM.

Shinagawa Station from Top Of Shinagawa.

Ninja Food And Karaoke

Matcha icecream in the afternoon. :)



After work some Japanese colleagues took us to a ninja themed restaurant. To go to our room in the restaurant we had to go through som "ninja training". A ninja jumped out from the wall and led us through a very narrow and dark aisle with different difficulties along the way.

The food was good - 10 courses. Here are some of the dishes.









I really didn't want to eat this little ninja. Kawaii!





Ninja chef.



Trained ninjas.




Afterwards we went to sing Karaoke - singing AKB48.

Having Dinner With Hiromi

Mostly work today as well. The others left the office at around 6 PM. I stayed and worked a little bit more because I had planned to meet an old colleague for late dinner.

Turned out the others went to Shibuya and had dinner at
The Lockup, a "haunted" prison/dungeon restaurant with loud music and darkness and a lot of monsters coming in to scare the guests. I heard they put handcuffs on Alex at the entrance. :)

I had matcha three times today - matcha latte in the morning at Starbuck's, matcha cake in the afternoon and matcha dessert at dinner.

Akihabara

Didn't do anything special today. Came to the office quite early, but my computer over here didn't work, so we had to reinstall Linux on it.

The others arrived after lunch and were quite tired after the long ride.

We left the office at around 6 PM and went to Akihabara.
Some of us were looking for AKB48 things and it wasn't me. ;)

It's Dark In Tokyo

Well, I'm here in Tokyo again. :)

Landed around 9.30 this morning. Took the airport limousine (i.e., bus) to Shinagawa Prince Hotel. The sky was very cloudy today and the risk of rain was hanging over us the whole evening, but luckily the rain never came.

I came to the hotel around 12.30 and wasn't allowed to check-in yet, so I left my bags and wandered around Shinagawa Station. I bought some green tea, had lunch and took it very slowly. I bumped into a colleague, Mattias, on the way back to the hotel. He was on his way to job. :(

The view from my hotel room at 22nd floor.




People queueing for something. Don't know what. Maybe the dolphin show they have at the hotel.




I skipped my usual afternoon nap, which I always take the first day in Tokyo in order to be human and alive again. I didn't feel so sleepy today after all. I guess I slept a few hours on the plane because all of a sudden it was time for second serving.

After a quick shower I took the train to Harajuku for some shopping. The clock was after 15 by that time, so I figured I had around 3 hours' shopping. And this is the art of spending three days' travel allowance in 3 hours. :-D

In Tokyo, they hand out the BIG shopping bags. :)




And if you notice the Lilo & Stitch bag, no, I wasn't at the Disney Store. I just
desperately needed a bag for all the stuff I bought at the Daiso 100 Yen store, most of it just candy and useless things I guess I will never use once at home.

Shopping T-shirts at UT store is always mandatory - I bought 11 for myself. Good quality, cool prints for affordable price. :)

In case you are reading, Jazze. Here is your shirt:




I wandered to Shibuya and took the train back to Shinagawa.

Yeah right, almost forgot to explain the title of this post. It is indeed very dark in Tokyo because they have to save electric power. Buildings and neon signs that usually are lit up are now turned off. At first I thought that they were celebrating something today and the shops were closed. Even the big crossing in Shibuya is not as lit up as before. I think only about 1/3 of the lights and signs are on.

Sharing Some Photos

It was quite cloudy that day. :-(


Spotted this guy by Rockefeller Center. Is it Christer Sandelin? How would I know?


Hm... What does it look like?


Alice in Central Park.


The red steps by Times Square. Empty because it is closed after 1 AM.


The night O.B.L. died.


Building in Ground Zero.


Looks like a spiderweb.


Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn. There was a bicycle thing going on that day.


Some Japanese ladies making matcha in Brooklyn Botanic Garden.


The result from Woodbury Premium Outlet. The bags to the left half belong to me. :-D

Top Of The Rock

Today we went to Top Of The Rock and up 62+ stories to get a view of Manhattan. It was raining today and the view was not that good. They offered us tickets for tomorrow, but this was our last day so we had no choice. I think it was due to the rain because it was not that many people up there.

Here is a view of Empire State Building from Top Of The Rock.


Central park


We had lunch at Rockefeller Center before heading to Macy's.

Around 3:30 PM we went back to the hotel to pick up our bags. It was time to get to Newark. It took four tries before we could get a taxi that was willing to get us to Penn Station in the rain. At Penn Station we took the train to the airport. We checked in around 3.5 hours before departure time at 8:15 PM. We thought that security check would be extreme due to the event 2 days ago, but it felt as usual. They had this body scan that could show all of you. :)

The flight got 30 minutes delayed due to late arrival from Munich and also some security stuff they said. We only had 30 minutes to get to our connection flight in Munich! I asked if we needed to be rebooked to another flight, but they said that estimated arrival to Munich would stay the same and that Munich airport was a small one. But as we got to Munich our plane had to circle around for 10 minutes to let an ambulance plane land first. All in all, we got off the plane at 10:40 AM and our connection flight was 10:45! We had to pass security and passport control! Well, we missed the connection flight, so we had to go to the Lufthansa service center to be rebooked. We got rebooked to a SAS flight 2.5 hours later. I asked for a free lunch as compensation. We got 10 euros each. :-D

Anyway, we're home now. Will share some more photos tomorrow.

Statue Of Liberty

We took the subway to South Ferry and took the Staten Island Ferry in order to take some pics of the Statue of Liberty. We took the same ferry back to Manhattan and continued to South Seaport via Wall Street. Reminder to myself: Don't ever eat Chinese food at food courts again ever!

After lunch we took the subway up to Apple Store. They only had the 64 GB, white, 3G and with Verizon in stock. I was told to call after midnight to see if they would get any new ones and if they would, then I should stand in the line that usually was formed. They didn't sell the batch until 8 o'clock the following day. Well... Not gonna do that. I bought an AppleTV 2 instead.

We walked 5th Avenue for some more shopping. The girls got themselves a photo with the half-naked guy standing at the entrance.

We had a late dinner at Red Lobster. It was good!

Central Park

Yesterday we went bicycling in Central Park. Got to see other parts of the park that I've never been to before. We skipped the American Museum of Natural History since we didn't had time to squeeze it in.



We took the subway downtown and ended up in Chinatown by coincidence so we had a late lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant there. After that we continued to the Flat Iron Building and then wandered up to 50th Street along 7th Avenue.

We stayed a short while at the hotel before heading down to Times Square and The New Amsterdam Theatre for Mary Poppins The Musical. Don't ask me if it was good or bad. I slept through 80% of the musical. And I'm not kidding at all. As soon as they tuned down the lights I was gone. I only woke up briefly when people applauded. It wasn't because I was jetlagged, it was because we were out until 2 AM the night before and had only got 5hrs' sleep.



And then after the musical the girls wanted to continue the night with shopping at Times Square. They were out until 00 AM. I sat down by the red steps at Times Square and waited for them when I got tired of shopping.



Surely there were police men in almost every corner and street around Times Square and other bigger streets, but it seems like business as usual for everybody and especially the tourists.

We went out to Times Square late last night to be part of the historic event. The clock had already passed midnight but we were curious about what it was like on the streets.

Surely there were people out celebrating and the streets were full of taxis heading south. Going to Ground Zero I guess, but Times Square was almost empty except for the crowd of maybe one-two hundred people gathered outside the Fox's News Studio. The news said there were around 6000 people at Ground Zero.

The news this morning showed clips from the three airports and other public areas like Port Authority. The military was on full alert and everywhere. Of all weeks, why did they had to kill him this week?! Couldn't they wait one more week?

... This is Mikael Ngo, reporting from Timea Square for Whatever Channel...

By the way. We are going to Central Park today. We will skip the National History Museum in favor of other stuff. Weather reports say 30% risk of rain, but mostly just showers.

Bin Laden Is Dead

This is big news! People are celebrating, crying, chanting and singing the Star-spangled Banner down at Times Square and Ground Zero. It feels a little bit strange since we were there just a few hours ago.

According to the news a lot of people are still not really sure how they feel about this though. Good news indeed they think, but how will the future be? Revenge actions from Al-Qaida?!?!?

Now I wonder how this will affect security at airports.

Cherry Blossom

Today we went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to see the blooming cherry trees. They had a festival called Sakura Matsuri yesterday and today. According to the pamflet there were a lot of performances and art with Japanese theme, but we didn't really care. I just wanted to see the cherry trees.

They had an esplanade they call the Cherry Esplanade - two corridors with blooming cherry trees on both sides. Quite beautiful actually. The garden had a Japanese themed pond with kois too, but this was of course nothing compared to all the real Japanese gardens in Japan.

Note the color of my shirt. :-D




We continued the day with walking over the Brooklyn Bridge. We stood in line for a pizza at Grimaldi's but we gave up after 30 minutes in the line. It would have taken an hour more before it was our turn we guesstimated...



We took a look at the construction site at Ground Zero. One of the buildings is actually on it's way. We shopped a little at the nearby Century 21. The original plan was China Town, Greenwich, and Soho after that but it was quite late so we ended up in Canal Street/Broadway for some more shopping instead.

Today's purchase:
* More Converse shoes
* Sun glasses from Guess, Levi's, and Ray Ban
* Underwear from Hilfiger and Calvin Klein