I was planning on updating my blog regularly when I was in Asia. Two things came into play, I think it's my purpose in life to not blog after I say I have updates coming. The other major problem was I forgot my usb cord for my camera. I didn't want to write a bunch of text and not have pictures. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait until I got home and then write up a few entries and post them a few days apart. I'll start with Tokyo.

Apparently Tokyo decided they liked the Eiffel Tower. They have one of their own. It may be called the Tokyo Tower or I may have just made that up in my mind. I tend to come up with ideas that I quickly convince myself are fact. Not sure if this is one of those instances. This is the view out our hotel.



Not a bad view, eh? I ran into trouble early when I realized not a single person in the city spoke English. I wasn't quite planning for that. Our first day we attempted to buy subway fare cards from a machine. The machine ate my Amex card and a small man popped a head out at me from a tiny hole. See below.



You can see my card is back in my hand. He was nice enough to return it to me. We ended up buying cards from a teller. They did not accept credit cards. That became a major theme in Tokyo. It was very strange for me, because I never use cash in the US.

I quickly established my massive height dominance. I enjoyed being at least a foot taller than everyone in the country. It made me feel like a badass. Here is a pic of me Anthony (Spud) and Scott (IRock). You can see that we look very much out of place.



BAM!



Sub zero or simply a nice Japanese man? You tell me.



For comparisons sake.



We went out to a nice sushi dinner our second night there. They served "sets" of food which meant that it was a set menu with a ton of different stuff on it. We got the biggest set which was probably a mistake. I'm not sure I've ever been as full as I was after we finished that meal. It didn't make much sense to me because we all eat a lot of food. If we can't take it down, who can?

They brought out the fish and cut it up in front of us. At one point they brought out live prawns, killed them, and then served them up about 1 min later. They were delicious. A cool thing about this restaurant was that the owner was there to great us and he talked us up for awhile. When we took the picture we have with him, we didn't know he was behind us. He kind of just snuck up on us. I was very pleased to see him there. I think the picture came out really well. One thing to note is that they don't really eat sushi rolls there. It's almost all sashimi. I didn't really expect that.







The next day we spent our morning trying to find somewhere to watch the NCAA championship game. No dice. It wasn't easy when no one understood what we were talking about. Imagine trying to find a college basketball game in a foreign country where they don't speak english or watch basketball. Not good. We ended up having a beer in a seedy 24 hour bar. There were nothing but completely wasted people in there, which was funny because it was 1130 in the morning. As we were leaving we saw a group of businessmen looking to get nasty.



We were lucky and ended up being in Tokyo for their Cherry Blossom bloom. It only lasts for one week each year. The locals use the bloom as an excuse to get rowdy. They all head out to park and drink all day. It made for a great time with some fantastic views. The trees looked awesome.



Showing off my height dominance again. Love it.







We ended up going out that night and hit the town pretty hard. There wasn't a whole lot to note. The next morning we were all feeling it. We were also pretty damn tired of eating nothing but fish. We had seen a Wendy's the day before and decided we wanted to seek it out. It took us about 20 min of going the wrong way on the subway to get to it, but it was well worth it. America, Fuck yeah!



That night we met up with Lawrence (a CR member) and his gf to catch a Japanese baseball game. The Giants were out of town so we saw the Fighters play the Marines. The first thing I noticed was the field was pretty small. I don't know the exact dimensions but it was definitely smaller than an American field. It led to a ton of home runs in the game. There were hits that looked like a routine line drive to the outfield that would just carry and be a home run. I was fine with that, because the game was very interesting. I think the final score was 9-8.

One thing that drove me crazy about the Tokyodome was they didn't accept credit cards anywhere in the building. Ok, not the biggest deal. What was crazy was that on top of not taking CC's, they didn't have any ATM machines. We went in low on cash on were unable to eat dinner or buy any beer. Brutal!







The next day we packed it up and head out to Phuckett, Thailand. Updates to come.