Joel’s Blog

July 28.

Wow! I felt sooo much better after sleeping 11 hours! We went to the data center again this morning. I actually accomplished much more today. We went to Akasaka for dinner and had sushi again. It was great!. I had a tuna plate, foie gras sushi, beef sushi, and geoduck! I also had some good sake.

When walking around we were approached by females several times asking if we wanted to have drinks with ‘beautiful woman’ . No offense to them but they were not what I would call beautiful. They work for different bars trying to get people to drink there. It was interesting.

More work tomorrow.

July 27.

We actually had to work today. We met the Citi data center team around 10 and got escorted to the data center. It is pretty much a normal data center except like everything else around here is it very clean and orderly. I did not get as much done as I had hoped. After work we went back to the hotel and I just crashed. I guess that the jet lag or something caught up to me. I was asleep by 8 PM.

July 26.

Update 1.
I got up about 7:45 AM and fixed some green tea. They have a hot water pot in the rooms. I tried the Ume Konbucha which from what i can find out is a kelp based drink. Very salty like broth.

Rob and I checked out the hotel garden this morning before having breakfast. It is pretty nice. Breakfast was American style at the hotel’s Garden Cafe. I had some eggs, fruit, and yogurt.

We found our way to the subway system to plan out our route to the Citi offices tomorrow morning. Good thing we did. The subway system is pretty huge. Citi’s offices are in the Harumi Triton Square buildings. It will probably take 20 minutes or so to get there.

More later.

Update 2:
We cam back to the hotel and relaxed a while. Jeff, our other team member from NY arrived. We went to the Ginza area and checked it out. So many shops and eateries. Every little side street is crammed full of things too. There are a lot of expensive, world class shops selling high end clothing, jewlery, etc. After walking around a while we went to the Akihabara Electric Town which was a strange place. Imagine if you will a place selling every kind of digital gizmo, old computer parts, anime crap, and girls dresses like anime characters. Ok that explains that place. Oh, and the guys with megaphones in front of the stores yelling. I assume they were telling us what a great deal they could offer on some product. Or perhaps they were some sort of street preacher… Anyway, I did find a card reader that accepts Olypmpus’ silly xD format card so I uploaded some pics. If you are on Facebook you can see them.

We were getting a little hungry so we headed back to Ginza since there were more choices there. We decided on sushi again (imagine that). The place was small and offered a la carte sushi which seems to be the exception at a lot of places. We got some pretty standard stuff but the menu was interesting. They had the strangest sushi that I have ever seen. No, not the weird clam thing, or the sea urchin.. it was HORSE sushi. That’s right HORSE!!! I looked online and it seems that with tuna shortages occurring places have resorted to serving horse. I did not brave that one.

Tomorrow will actually consist of work. What a shame.

Oh yeah.. I forgot to mention how CLEAN this place is. No cigarette butts (even though smoking is very prevalent), very little (almost no) trash on the streets. I literally saw one plastic bag blowing down the sidewalk. The funny thing is that I don’t see tons of people cleaning up. It seems to be that people just don’t litter.

July 24/25.

So traveling to Tokyo was interesting. We connected from Charleston to Atlanta. From there it was a 13.5 hour flight to Tokyo Narita Airport. You actually fly up over Wisconsin, Canada, Alaska, and the edge of Siberia to get to Tokyo from Atlanta. The flight was pretty good overall. I could not sleep much though.

We got to the Tokyo Narita Airport around 5PM Saturday Tokyo time. That was 4AM EDT Saturday. We had an interesting taxi ride to the Hotel New Otani. The drive spoke very little English. He pretty much said “USA #1!, New York, and Tokyo.” He seemed to take a scenic route which was OK except that i was dying to take a shower and get cleaned up. The hotel staff is amazingly nice and helpful. We had a drink at the rooftop bar on the Main Tower and then had sushi at a restaurant in the Garden Tower. We thoroughly entertained a Japanese couple that must have thought it was our first time having sushi. We had tuna belly (toro, fatty tuna) which was incredible, swordfish (a first for me), squid, eel, scallop, freshly dispatched shrimp (it had been wriggling only moments before), sea urchin (not a bad flavor but a nightmare texture), the cooked shrimp head innards (not good, tasted like burnt hair), a tuna roll, a cucumber roll, and miso soup. They finish up with green tea. Overall dinner was really nice even if it was expensive. ¥6,000 ( about $63!) Tokyo is expensive. We retired for the evening after the sushi. I turned on the super nice Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV and there were weird game show looking things on.

End of Day 0. Pics forthcoming… (as soon as I get a proper cable or card reader…)