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Fun things I learned from my last trip to Japan

October 5, 2011 in Everyday | Tags: 2010, a bathing ape, bape, bathing ape, bathroom, blog, cafe, christmas, december, department, department-store, food, fruit, fruits, groceries, grocery, harajuku, japan, japanese, journal, los-angeles, music, new-york, otohime, post, rain, shibuya, shinjuku, shopping, store, technology, toilet, tokyo, travel, western, winter | Comments closed

The last time I visited Japan was in December 2010, with my fiancee & my friends. These are some of the fun things I learned from my trip. Enjoy.

1. When you go to a cafe & sit outside and/or next to the window, you will be given a blanket to keep your lap/legs warm (only during Winter season).

2. Most restaurants/cafes have a designated basket with a cloth cover at each dining table. When you are seated, you can put your purse and/or shopping bags in the basket to keep your bags clear from the aisles & to keep them from getting dirty.

3. Hotel rooms will recycle your bed sheets & towels for 3 days unless you put the “change my sheets” card on your bed. This saves a lot on cleaning & water!

4. When it rains, all shops/stores will put a plastic cover on all of your shopping bags so they don’t get wet. (This is the one thing I wish our stores had in the U.S.)

5. Dudes are paid to drive big trucks with giant billboards around town while blaring the most annoying KPop music by the popular Korean boy band 2PM. (Do you notice that I don’t like the band 2PM?)

6. During Christmas time, even though you are overseas, you will NOT escape Western Christmas music…You will hear it EVERYWHERE. You will also hear “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” & Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” about 50 times a day, while not really sure if the locals even know what the lyrics mean.

7. If you go shopping at a major department store, the sales people will try to sell you everything & anything. They are insanely pushy, but polite as hell about it.

8a. I love the clothing brand A Bathing Ape, & I’ve noticed that ALL sales staff at every single Tokyo region Bathing Ape (a.k.a. BAPE) store are friendly & cool. Although they can’t speak much English, they can understand it & try to speak it to make you feel welcome. (I have also found that the sales staff at the BAPE stores in NY & L.A.(which is now closed) are also friendly/nice.)

8b. Every single time I go shopping at a Tokyo region Bathing Ape store with my fiancee, we will get special treatment, we will make friends with at least one sales clerk. I don’t understand this, but I guess my fiancee just appears to be outgoing & perhaps that is why others tend to gravitate toward him & can talk to him easily…even when there is a language barrier. (P.S. If you are ever in Shibuya, Tokyo….look up a guy named Saito at the BAPE store in Shibuya. He is one of the coolest store clerks I’ve ever met in Japan.)

9. You will see cheesy American restaurant chains all over Tokyo (eg. Outback, TGI Fridays, Denny’s, L&L Hawaiian BBQ, El Torito, Sizzler), but don’t expect crazy lines out the door. You will only find that mind-numbing queue at Eggs ‘N Things (which came from Hawaii). The whole Western food trend has come & gone already. (Plus, I’m a little biased & think that the Japanese spin on Western/American food tastes so much better than the way it’s cooked back home.)

10. You will hear Western Pop music everywhere compared to Japanese Pop music (which is not played nearly as much as Western Top 40/Pop). I couldn’t escape the songs “We R Who We R” by Ke$ha or “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz when I was in Tokyo.

11. The new latest invention in Japanese technology: Otohime. Every public bathroom stall will have a device that will make a running water sound for a more discreet bathroom experience. You just press the button on the device & it will make a flushing noise to mask the sounds. You can eve buy this in a handy pocket device for travel and/or public use.

12. Most public bathrooms will have a “regular” stall with squat-in-the-ground toilets or “Western” stalls with sit-down toilets. I thought this was pretty cool…that some rather old fashioned traditions still remain.

13. Fruits are not as expensive as you think they are. It’s not as if every grocery store in town will have that $40 watermelon you saw on reddit.com/ebaumsworld.com. Ok, so compared to American grocery store prices, they are pretty pricey ($6 for 2 apples). However, they are much more beautiful in color & shape, much more sweeter, & bigger in size compared to our U.S. market fruits. So, it’s almost like getting more fruit for your money. Plus, the only $40 fruits you will find are the organic ones, grown on some special farm, & comes in a fancy wrapped box that are supposed to be for gift giving. Those fruits you will find at super luxe department stores like Matsuzakaya or Mitsukoshi…or at fancy grocery stores that specifically sell organic goods.

China, it’s been a long time…

August 25, 2011 in Everyday | Tags: blog, china, everyday, journal, post, shanghai, thoughts, travel | Comments closed

For the first time, since the last time… (from movie: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist)

It’s been a long time since I last visited China, which was in 2003, and I just recently returned from a 2 week vacation in Shanghai. This experience was so much more different from any of the other times I have visited China. I had no parents who could hold my hand every step of the way & fluently translate everything for me, no comfort bubble of being surrounded by my fellow classmates from some stuffy summer school program, & I did not attend some cheap-ticket fast-paced tour group with matching t-shirts either. I traveled all the way to Shanghai with only my companion by my side & a handy little guidebook to help me navigate through the main districts.

One valuable resource I was extremely fortunate to have while I was there was my very wonderful cousin and her husband. My cousin and her husband resides in Shanghai, and I really enjoyed spending time with her while I was vacationing. Also, I was very excited for her to meet my companion in person. My cousin was a very valuable resource since she & her husband each own & drive their own cars in Shanghai, so they were able to take us to various local places we wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

I’ve visited Shanghai a couple of times before, but I was always traveling with my parents, & my mom can speak fluent Mandarin & partial Shanghainese. So it was easy to get around and have my mom do all the talking and translating for us. Plus, that also meant that we would have lots of family obligations since my mom still has relatives living in Shanghai (hence my cousin). With all of those family events going on…I was always being shuffled & chauffeured around by my relatives & had no time to go out & see things for myself. I’ve also been to Beijing as well, but that was for a student youth program, & it’s hard to explore on your own when the head teacher/instructor has each day’s itinerary mapped out for you. All the students pile onto a tour bus & we get shuffled from one small town to the next for a small blip of sightseeing & Kodak moments.

Traveling with my companion, no matter where we go to, we like to keep things fresh & not really stick to a strict itinerary. When we leave our hotel for the day there are only 2 essential items we must have at all times: 1. our cell phones (for emergencies) & 2. a guidebook of the city. Our guidebook of choice, if it has a matching city, is written by superfuture (called superfuture guide). This is our favorite guidebook publication because it breaks down each category (eating, shopping, entertainment) by the city’s districts. Whenever my companion & I travel to Tokyo, we always print out a superfuture guide & bring it with us as if it were our travel bible. My companion & I love to choose a random destination for the day & just walk around the district & explore with our own eyes. We were very fortunate that both of us could speak a moderate amount of Mandarin (& my companion can read some Chinese characters), so we were able to get around by ourselves.

On this particular trip, my companion was going to Shanghai for business, & I was tagging along with him. Every day after work, I’d either meet my companion at the hotel so he could drop off his briefcase, or take the subway & meet him somewhere, & we would spend hours roaming the streets just like the locals. On his days off, we’d wake up super early & head out for some breakfast & a quick ride on the subway before we hit the mid-morning human traffic jam. We would often spend our days hopping from one district to another, checking out local shops & small cafes, as well as visiting famous parks & landmarks. We explored the large conglomerate shopping malls, to the small mom n’ pop shops, to the local bazaar selling those glaringly obvious knockoffs. We went on an eating spree (every foodie’s dream)…from local cafes & mid-range restaurants, to fancy restaurants, to Hong Kong style snack shops, to fast food joints. We ate it all…cheap to expensive….& we didn’t care what havoc this was wreaking on our waistlines & digestive tracts.

Overall, this trip was one of the most fun & eye-opening vacations I’ve ever experienced. I am very grateful to my cousin for being “that someone we know in-town” & for being such a gracious hostess. Here are some of the highlights of our Shanghai trip: