No Maps for These Territories

Here’s day one of my month long journey to Tokyo.  If you’d like to see the entire gallery, it’s here.

Kevin’s luxurious room in Chez Coziahr.  Our bed and breakfast has many themed rooms, this one is titled “yarn”.

Liquid nerves for the 11 hour plane trip.

Zzzzzz.

Range discovers that alcohol is free on intercontinental flights.

This lady sat next to us, and she was hilarious.  She kept slapping the back of my head when she wanted to tell me something, and yelling “chotto”.  She quickly became part of our crew, and then gave us an 18 year old bottle of scotch as a present.  I shit you not.  The only thing we were able to give her was the gift of our wonderful personalities.

Thanks for the free booze, mystery lady!

When I got up to get snacks, she demanded I bring her a banana.

I will never, ever fly United again.  Look at this spread.  It tastes as good as it looks.

Kevin gets his ticket for the Kinsei skyliner.  Off to Ueno!

Look closely, this is the last ground you will see that’s not covered with concrete.

Our train.  Complete with bathrooms and vending machines.  Yeah, fuck you, BART.  San Fran public transit is a joke.

Am I in a hostel, or prison?  Hard to tell.  The Hotel New Koyo is awesome, though.  $27 a night, private rooms, great staff, free wireless internet, gobs of eurotrash.

My room is seriously quite small.

Kevin tries to escape the hostel.

Right down the street from us is some of the tastiest spicy noodle soup I’ve ever encountered.  And we met some new friends, who wanted to know things like “what does attractive mean?” and “what is a medusa?”, and then proceeded to buy us a free beer.

The ramen selection at our local convenience store.

Screw ramen, Range heads for the cans of coffee and beer.

Yes, that’s spaghetti.

Hitler says, be careful around construction sites!

Beautiful rainy night in Ueno.

Happy hour is all day long on Wednesdays at the local pub.  Wait till you guys see the video I’ll upload with the ultrasonic Guinness machine.  It creates a head on top of the beer with sound.  Ohhh yeah, technology.

Asahi dark is a wonderful beverage.  I think I’ll have another.

Make that another.  And another.

I can’t explain this, but I had to post it because Range will kill me.

It’s fun to squat and shit, kids!

I absolutely love that there is no theft here.  Leave out your bike, your umbrella, you name it, no one is going to steal it.  Kind of like how it should feel living in a first world country full of adults.

This is my new office.  That’s a massage chair, a beer, and my laptop.  Nice end to our first day.