Heiwa Plaza Hotel Yokohama

... am 31.08.09 gehts von osaka ab in die phillipinen....und dann bin ich wieder im budget airlines gebiet, kann dann billig weiter nach indonesien oder sogar australien....mal schaun.<br><br>Aber soll ja nicht nur ums geld gehen, sondern um japan...wobei japan wie china geld anbetet.<br><br>Alles dreht sich ums geld nix is umsonst, ueberall wo es noch nen yen abzugreifen gibt wirds auch getan...bisschen schade, speziell ...

... curry house, and realised that the entire menu was in Japanese, with no supplemental English. Veronica walked outside with the waitress and pointed out our desired meals to the waitress. Apparently she ordered the tempura prawn meal for me. Good choice. I've got to say that the simplicity of a tempura battered and freshly flash fried tempura prawns is hard to beat. Fantastically good combination of 3 giant tempura prawns, some other tempura fried ...

... Stopped for a bit of lunch (all that sea air!) and then found our way to the largest building in Japan ...

... anything else that needs a voltage. The prices here are comparably cheaper than in the UK but not by much, but the experience was fun trying out all the gadgets. Eventually I found the camera set I needed... the Canon EOS400D and a Sigma 12-24 f/4.5-5.6. Basically it means no more film developing and a wide angled lens to capture everything outside of the normal frame of shot. The guy serving me spoke almost no English apart from the terms of the ...

... Ryo-Iago! But I had to say something to acknowledge his fame. Mr S looked nonchalant, but the woman showed a Mona Lisa smile, looking satisfied at last. Exhausting further subjects for discussion, the woman stood up and fetched a pen and a memo book. "You live nearby, do you? You have some photos you want to show or to see? And we like to keep record of visitors we receive." She asked me to jot down ...

... Bridge crosses the Sumida River, which is the main waterway through Tokyo, a city which is laced with waterways of one type or another. Besides the river, there are many man made canals which connect to it, or to other rivers, and then there are the remains of the various moats which at one time surrounded Edo Castle. The distance of these moats from what remains of the castle now gives you an idea of it's immense size when it was built 400 odd years ago. Crossing the bridge I ...

... My instinct tells me, nevertheless, that it has become a distrusting society. The drive for 'protection of privacy and individual information' seems to gone a little too far. Although not as prominent as in London, closed circuit TV cameras are becoming features of our town. The media and corporations are talking of information protection so much so that it is almost encouraged that we internalise the ethics of being wary of our behaviour at all ...

... in Japan (no eating your big Mac while walking down Main Street, coffee while walking had just become acceptable with the advent of Starbucks.) Jen decided to eat the sushi for lunch tomorrow and we set off to find the restaurant we read about in Frommers. This ended up to be a little ways off the beaten path in the city with no street names, but by some miracle (there are actually tons of maps on every street corner which is helpful) we found the N.S building in ...

Where to begin? It feels as though I've been here for much longer than I actually have, which means that the "I really am here!" feeling is starting to sink in properly. It means, however, that I have so many things to write about that I don't know where to start! So I've begun a list of topics to cover and I'll try to write about them article-style, to be a little more coherent. Some subjects, such as food (oh god, the food! THE FOOD IS HEAVEN!) and ...

there is a beer vending machine at the airport that is really cool. after it pours the beer it actually squirts a little foam on top of the beer. neat! my back is sort of hurting and i remember that the business class seats recline a lot further than the cheap class seats. so i went to the ticket counter and asked the nice ticketing agent if there is any remote chance that i ...