The Day before yesterday was quite possibly the worst day of my travels so far. Jesus it was horrible.

So we decided to go to Tokyo to see Akihabara, the Imperial Gardens and some outdoor shopping place with a name that I could never hope to remember. Getting there was OK I guess but the problem was that it was friggin raining so I couldn’t really take that many pictures. So now I have nothing to really show for my day spent in Tokyo except for a few pictures of the Imperial Garden in Tokyo.

The Imperial Garden was so underwhelming that I will not even subject you to looking at pictures of huge lawns. And then I lost all interest in taking pictures when I saw a bunch of weeds growing in the garden. I would have thought that since this was the Emperor’s garden that it would be the best damn garden in Japan but nope there were friggin weeds! eh.

Next we decided to walk to Akihabara. it was about a mile and a half. We wanted to, you know, experience some of the city. So we walked the mile and a half and then we got to Akihabara. Everything looked great but it was pouring rain so no pictures. There were two things for me in Akihabara.

The first was I got to see two all-in-one PC’s that are nowhere to be found in the US and are quite amazing. These are the NEC Valuestar and the Fujitsu something or another. The Fujitsu was OK but the NEC Valuestar was amazing. If that thing was in the US I would never have gotten an iMac.

The second interesting thing was when my girlfriend and I accidentally walked into an anime porn rental store or maybe they were selling the crap. Either way it was horribly labeled in bright colors and connected to a vintage video games store. I went up to the second level hoping to find Chrono Cross (a 9 year old PlayStation game), but no I was assaulted by anime porn. Wonderful. I should have known when I saw a friggin poster with some girl in a uniform with her underwear half off. Eh oh well. The strange thing is that the place was labeled PC/DVD how the hell was i supposed to know what it was? eh, oh well that’s Japan.

Then we went to that outdoor market, in the rain. It would have been really nice if it wasn’t pouring rain. It was just like a Taiwan day market except everything was double or triple the price and it was cleaner. hmm where have I said that before? eh whatever

Now here is the friggin horrible part of the trip. We decided to head back at a time when it was the rush hour. Usually rush hour is busy but this was three thousand time worse. I spent most of the trip with a fat man’s ass in my crotch it was……wonderful…… I thought I had experienced rush hour when I was in Taipei but this was different. the train was already packed when we left Ueno station. When we got to Kawasaki it was packed and like 30 people left the train car and then maybe 50 got on. At this point the people at the door had to push back with all their might so that they could fit behind the door to let it close (this was how the fat man’s ass got mashed into me). And then when the doors close the people let go and their faces were mashed up against the glass on the door. So this was horrible because the stops were so friggin far apart. So I had a fat man’s ass in my crotch for about 20 minutes.

Then! after all this crap we decided to get Sushi at the Yokohama station (my girlfriend had sushi). And it sucked! can you believe it? Crappy sushi in Japan, where Sushi originated. The sushi was cut wrong, it was very thick and had a crapload of wasabi under the fish. so that was bad. I had eel with rice and that was passable. I would expect Japanese Japanese food to be better than what we get in the US but nope so far it was not been. I will see tonight when we go to another place tonight. But this is like getting bad buffalo wings in Buffalo New York, oh wait I have had bad Buffalo wings in Buffalo.

So yeah worst traveling day ever. If you are ever in Japan do not ride the subway between like 4:30PM and 6:30PM. jeez worst day ever……

Luckily for you guys I actually do have internet access! But I must also relay some very bad news. So far it seems as though Japan also has a complete and total lack of Red Vines. Both Japan and Taiwan both have neither the black Red Vines nor the Red Red Vines. I had hoped being three hours closer to the United States would make it more likely that Japan would have Red Vines but no! No Red Vines =(. Anyways! On to more important things!

So as you know I am in Japan. Today we went to Yokohama we saw places like the Landmark Tower which looks like this!

Sorry the picture sucks but I have this fixed focal length lens on my SLR camera so I could only get the whole tower in with my crappy Polaroid point and shoot. Just so you know, as point and shoot cameras go Polaroids suck, but it was really cheap on www.woot.com so there you have it!

But anywho, the tower was cool when I went in I thought that I was in America. If I couldn’t hear, couldn’t read lips, and didn’t notice that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, was Japanese I would have thought that I was in some new super duper mega mall in the US. This was the craziest mall I have ever been in in my entire life (crazy as in really really nice the Taipei 101 mall included). It was like four buildings interconnected and each building was a mall. Architecturally speaking it was amazing, but all of the stores were the super expensive brands that nobody can afford.

Here is another picture for your consumption.

That is some other building in Yokohama and guess what! It has a mall under it to! How unpredictable.

But one thing about Japan that is really different from Taiwan is that in Japan most people do not understand English. In Taiwan I can go into any restaurant and speak English and they will somewhat understand. In Japan no such luck. But I guess that is to be expected in a foreign country but Taipei is nicer in that respect.

The other things about Japan so far is that everything is SO EXPENSIVE compared to Taipei. I paid 10 bucks for this tiny bit of pasta. The pasta didn’t even have sauce in it! It was spaghetti with fish, basically this was fish flavored pasta and it was 10 dollars! Oh well things can’t be all cheapy cheap everywhere.

Other than things being amazingly expensive and American like, one great thing about Japan are the public toilets. oh my lord look at this.

To the left you can see the Bidet controls. Yes that’s right! a Bidet in a public restroom! jeez louise that is nice. that toilet is amazing. I could not get it in the picture but behind me and to the left is a little chingaderra that you can fold out and then…put your baby in it. That’s right! When you need to take a dump and you have your baby with you, you can bring him or her into the stall. But maybe I misunderstood the Japanese characters but there was a picture of a baby and space for legs. So that was weird but the toilets are amazing!

Yokohama is much more of a tourist location than Taipei and it really shows. Overall Yokohama is amazing but I think I like Taipei better. We’ll see what I think of Tokyo when I get a chance to go there during the week hehe. Ok guys I am going to go to sleep or something it’s late as all hell here. Peace out ya’ll!