Joel’s Blog

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.