Arigatou Gozaimasu

Been meaning to post this for sometime now but procrastination has been pulling me back. Japan has been fascinating to me since I was young, maybe due to the fact that it was expensive back then and we rarely traveled anywhere for holiday, but it is one of the places which I've wanted to visit.


Our first accommodation, First Cabin at Haneda Airport.
It was pretty small and I didn't sleep much. Slept at 12am and
woke up at 4am.














The first item I bought in Japan is this chocolate biscuit which I had
for breakfast. The taste was ok, but it totally reminded me that
I'm in Japan from the vending machine I bought it from.

Had nothing to do due to unable to sleep and took this video of the "cabin"

Had free time the next day, and so, we visited Shinjuku, Shibuya and Akihabara.
Akihabara was a great place for me. Lots of electronics, figures, dvds. Didn't take
much photos of the other places though. Was in a working mood, didn't thought
of the places, which was a waste.


Big Celine Dion poster at Akihabara



Streets in Akihabara

This video reminds me of the sights and sounds of Akihabara and to me is the
definitive video of the trip to Japan. The atmosphere is clearly heard and displayed.

Trains in Japan are pretty much similar, but I noticed one of the more prominent
sounds is the squeaking of the trains due to age?




With a price tag of almost RM150 per night, Toyoko-Inn
Souka-eki NIshi-guchi (eki = Station, Nishi = West, Guchi = Exit)
is a pretty nice place to live in. The rooms were quite spacious
with a soft bed. Its pretty far from Akihabara though but good
for the adventurous which likes to explore the outskirts of the city.



Our original intention in Japan was to visit the laboratories to see
their capabilities to compare with the local laboratories for building
products. Throughout the trip in Soka we had the pretty Satomi Hoshi as
the translator (far right).




Plastic food display do look nice but we didn't eat the actual food in
respect to the Muslim lecturers which I accompanied in this trip.


Besides Soka, we went also to Osaka, using the high speed
bullet train Nozomi N700. Its a bit pricey, with RM500 for the ticket
from Tokyo to Osaka. At 2 hours for a 500+ km distance, it
really is fast though. There are other options, slower trains
but cheaper tickets. But since we hadn't too much time to spare
we took the fastest available.


This cost me 1000 Yen which is about RM30++.
Its a bento box with fish, caviar and mushrooms.
Kinda salty though with the caviar. The original intention
was to buy this because the box looks nice and I thought
maybe to keep it as a souvenir. But heck, the box is made
of plastic with a paper bottom.


One of the last photos of the box which I had to throw.
Sad that it cannot be kept.



Forgot the name of the hotel at Osaka but the room is pretty small.
Costs more than the one in Soka but with smaller rooms. There;s no wifi
at the rooms either.

We visited a number of places which can be categorized into two:

being sight-seeing and shopping. For shopping we went Shinsaibashi and

Namba while for sight seeing, we went to the Osaka Castle park and

Umeda Sky Building.

Osaka Castle Park video

Eating to Live or Living to Eat

This video made me think. Are we eating to live or are we living to eat.

La surconsommation

Treatment to Insensitive People

Recently, I've read a post by Felis-domestica-licious here that mentions on friends that the she would unfriend on Facebook. What caught my attention was this:-

*update*

This case no. 3 bests all cases: a university friend died in a workplace accident. Friends offered condolences on FB. One persistent agent wrote something like: this is the outcome of not having sufficient insurance coverage: your loved ones suffer when mishaps befall you.  Contact me to review your insurance policy.

Unfriend! There’s no other way!

How much more insensitive can a person be? A person died and all she (the post was made by a she, a friend to felis-domestica-licious) knew was to advertise her services? Did she mean she could defeat Death with her insurance policy? With this in mind, when anything happened to the FB persona, I suggested to felis to advertise the following:-

TradeLet

Double-back again! Been out of the scene for quite a while.
I just started my own website, trying to some small business you might say. It's called TradeLet or Trade Outlet here. It's a site where I let people post their items for sale . classified adverts where I charge them only RM1.50 or USD$0.5 per post which is permanent for as long as they want. Here in this blog maybe I would start chronicling my progress and steps I've taken to get publicity, adverts etc so that other people may learn from it and may one day be more successful than I did? or maybe they have things to advice me? Anyways will start tomorrow with a post on it!

玫瑰香 Rose Incense

I used to be looking for this song until I recently heard in on Superstar.

It's called 玫瑰香 or Rose Incense I think (Google translates it Muscat).

I wonder what's the name of the original Orchestral (Russian?) version name?

Ramblings - 24th Dec

First, I'm going to congratulate a friend of mine on her 26th Birthday!
Happy Birthday Elaine!
Life is short, with so much suffering around the world, natural disasters, war, hunger, flooding, earthquakes, crimes happening every other day...so every birthday is definitely worth congratulating.

Now to the main point.
Life is short, sometimes I wonder, are humans born to be selfish? Taking care of our own priorities first before anyone else even people closest to you? Are there actually people who care about others first before themselves? Some crave popularity and neglect people on their side, not  realizing that sometimes those on their side get hurt? I've seen a lot of these happening lately and I wonder if myself is to blame? It makes you reflect back but I guess these things are part of the world / part of life and as long as one is happy with his own life and actions, the rest doesn't matter. Maybe the last sentence actually and totally envelopes the concept of human selfishness?

The Singhsons

This is funny. An Indian version of the Simpsons called the Singhsons..
I hope no one is offended as it was intended to be humorous...

It's nearly X'mas - 22nd Dec

Ah. It's nearly X'mas again. (Christmas is an archaic language in the year 2999, see Futurama S2E17). Anyways it's the time of the year where everyone gives or receives gifts and maybe just give but no one gives back, but anyways I've started to make resolutions for next year, hopefully they'll be achieved.

Even though it was supposed to be a time for joy and merriment, but it saddens me though that some of my fellow bloggers have abandoned their blogs. Some cannot be blamed due to political pressure, some due to lack of time, some due to lack of interest from the community, hence lack of readers. To many it was hoped that the blog can help them generate money, but to me, I just write whenever I like without caring for money or anything.

But well, this year has been tough and I hope next year would be better. One of the first resolutions I have in my mind now would be to update this blog with anything, at least twice a week. Hopefully everything will run smooth and readers will increase!