Tag: nerdtour

Here we go again! Nerdtour 2025 begins this month!

Well, here we go again, I’m getting ready to start another trip to Japan, this time it’s going to be a big one! Since I retired last year, I’m not going have the income to be a world traveler anymore, so I decided to make a final grand adventure to the Land of the Rising Sun, lasting 2 whole months! There was going to be a trip in 2023, but layoffs happened and spurred my retirement, then discovering I had 4 blocked cardiac arteries meant I had to get those re-routed. That laid me up for a bit, but I still thought I could make a trip in Spring of 2024, but again events conspired, and I didn’t feel comfortable making the trip so soon (8 months) after my major surgery, so I figured I’d better get healthier before setting off in ’25. Since then I started walking a lot, lost a lot of weight, put my diabetes into remission, and got a clean bill of health from my doctors.

Given all that, and checking my finances, I decided that this year would be my best chance to once more visit Japan during cherry blossom season. Since it may well be my last, given my financial situation, I figured I’d go all out and stay for 2 months, so that hopefully I can see enough of Japan for the rest of my life. After nearly kicking the bucket in ’23, it’s time to check things off my bucket list!

So, starting on March 22, I leave for Tokyo, where I’ll have an apartment for the duration as a base of operations for whatever trips in Japan that I can squeeze in during the time. Oh, and I promise that I will try to blog more often than I did during Nerdtour 2018, since I’ll have more time, and I don’t plan to exert myself into exhaustion like I did back then!

Nerdtour Japan 2018 – Birthday washout…

Well, I was here in Tokyo for fireworks on my birthday, but Nature conspired to send a typhoon my way, which forced Tokyo to delay the fireworks.  It wasn’t a total washout, I did manage to celebrate by going to Akihabara, which turned out to be much closer to my apartment than I originally thought, only a couple of stops on the subway.  The fireworks will go off today, Sunday, but I had already made other plans for this evening, so I’ll end up going to one of the other Tokyo fireworks displays they have over the next couple of weeks.

Some pics from the last few days:

Kamakura fireworks Tuesday

Kiyosumi garden:

Akihabara on my birthday:

Nerdtour Japan 2018 – HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT!

And I don’t mean the song by Buster Poindexter from years ago, I mean the thermal climate has been ridiculously, dangerously, even deadly hot here in Japan.  The day after I got here, Monday, I had to go in from Narita down to Shinjuku, Tokyo, to pick up the key to my apartment, and it happened to be the hottest day so far.  My buddy John and I took the Narita Express train to Shinjuku, which was nice and comfortably air conditioned, but once we got off the train and started heading through the station, it wasn’t so nice.  We checked luggage into coin lockers (wonderful convenience that would never be permitted in Paranoia, USA) in Shinjiku station and walked out into the blast furnace/sauna.  It’s only a kilometer or so to the Sakura House apartment office from the station, but it only took about 5 steps to break into an unending sweat.  There were people all over handling the heat however they could, but no one was stopping the city from running.  It might have seemed to be moving a bit slower, though.

Once we got our keys we headed back to the station and got our respective loads of luggage from the lockers.  I only recently figured out where the word “luggage” comes from, after lugging around my suitcase and helping John with his 4(!) bags in the heat.  We were able to make the train, getting on a direct line to Monzen-nakacho, the neighborhood where the apartments are, riding the Metro with wonderful air conditioning.  Once back outside, we discovered that the taxi stand we were expecting was no longer there, which meant a long, hot, miserable haul of luggage down the street to the apartments, “only” a couple of kilometers.  Buildings A and B are only 3 floors high, which means there were no elevators, so I had to haul my single suitcase up to my room on the 3rd floor.  Fortunately the air conditioning worked, and I turned that thing on as high and as cold as I could make it, to bring the apartment temp down to something approaching relief.

After collapsing in a puddle in the lone chair, I turned on the TV to see what was on, and happened on a special program where they were discussing the weather.  I learned that we had been hauling our stuff around in temperatures over 41 degrees C, with humidities over 50%.  I don’t know what that made the “heat index”, but 41 C is over 105 F, which is hot all by itself without the added misery of humidity.

At any rate, we survived, and I crashed in my apartment about 9 PM, after getting some drinks, a towel so I could take a shower, and a bit of food at the convenience store down the street.  That should have been enough hauling around for the week, but no, I had plans for Tuesday…

Nerdtour 2016: Arrival, Japan!

Well I’m here, after a long flight with very little sleep, it’s currently 10:45 PM on Monday night, 9:45 AM Monday morning to you all in Eastern Daylight Time, and I’m in Narita, Japan.  Specifically, I’m in a hotel room just down the road (and a short train ride) from Narita Airport, taking advantage of their Internet to post this and a short video I made earlier.  I was just conscious enough to get a JR East Rail Pass to use this trip, and I got a new Suica card to use on the train and the subway, and the vending machines, and a lot of other places!

The funniest and kind of neatest thing so far is, I was interviewed for a Japanese entertainment program called “Why Did You Come To Japan?”, which I’ve seen a few times on YouTube.  They asked me a lot of questions, the main guy spoke only Japanese, very fast, but with the help of a translator I was able to hold my own, and came back with Japanese responses as well!  I’m sure that editing will make it funny, which is okay, because being completely jet-lagged and exhausted I was pretty loopy!

On the train from the airport to Narita proper, I didn’t see anything blooming at all, so I don’t think there will be any cherry blossom pictures from here on this trip, unless they come out just before I leave.  I’ll make a pass by the shrine complex at Naritasan, and at least get some pictures of the area.

I also posted this video just after I checked in, and despite what I said in the video, I did lay down and sleep for about 3 hours, which is why I’m able to type this blog post!

More tomorrow!

Nerdtour 2016: Counting down the hours to launch…

dc_sakura-001Getting close now, and I’m trying to get everything set up before I leave.  Laundry, packing, re-packing due to forgetting something, re-re-packing due to everything I want to take not fitting, etc.  At least I finished my taxes, and managed to get some pictures of this year’s cherry blossoms downtown.  Checking the weather at Chicago where I lay over for a couple of hours, and the long-range forecast for Tokyo and vicinity for next week.

Two things I plan to do to make this trip a bit easier than the ones before, one of them I’d been planning for some time, and one came out of the blue since I had no idea they even had them.  One, a service that nearly all hotels provide or at least cooperate with shipping companies to provide, is called “takkyubin”, which is a baggage-forwarding service.  If you’re hotel-hopping like I plan to, it’s great because you can turn in your suitcase at the hotel or nearby convenience store or delivery office, and for a small fee they’ll send it off to your next destination, usually delivered by the next day.  This saves having to lug the whole mess around, trying to find space on the train or subway car.  They can send it to the airport as well, which sounds horrible to us paranoid Americans, but in Japan it’s completely safe.  In fact, the main delivery company Yamamoto, has as their logo a mother cat carrying a kitten!

The other nice surprise I found is that there are at least a half-dozen companies in Japan that will rent 4G LTE wi-fi hotspots to tourists!  I was worried about trying not to use too much of the hotels’ bandwith, or trying to find a public wi-fi spot that wasn’t crowded.  This is exactly what I’m renting from T-Mobile to use here, I’ve been able to get great speeds with wide access, and according to the Japanese sites, their companies provide hi-speed hot-spots that work all over the country!  The rates are reasonable, too, the one place I’m looking at will rent the box for about $90 total for the two weeks, which even though it’s twice what I’m paying here, it’s JAPAN!

At any rate, blogging will be sparse between now and when I land in Narita, but I’ll try to keep this blog up-to-date!

Nerdtour Japan 2016: Once More With Sakura!

Sakura by moonlightSo, once again I prepare to depart for the Land of the Rising Sun, where the cherry blossoms (sakura) are in bloom!  This will be a relatively short trip, only two weeks, but the goal is to take as many pictures of cherry trees in bloom in as many iconic Japanese places as possible, given the short time they bloom.  Plus since the Tidal Basin here in DC is full of cherry trees from Japan that are now also in bloom, I hope to take pictures of them before go, too!

Blogging may be spotty, but I’ll try to at least post something each day.

The Nerdtour 2016 starts Sunday, March 27!

Kiyosumi Garden, Tokyo

kiyosumi-001

Almost exactly 2 years ago today, October 23 2012, I was on the first full day of my third trip to Japan, a month-long excursion I called “Nerdtour 2012” (I blogged it on this site).  One of the best places I went was this little slice of old Tokyo park design, called Kiyosumi Garden.  It was just about 1 or 1.25 miles up the road from the apartment I stayed at, and my buddy John had been there before, so on a somewhat rainy day we set off to see this.  It’s a nicely laid-out park, with a large pond or small lake in the middle, beautiful landscaping, and more turtles in one place than I had seen in a long time!  I took this picture of a couple having their picture taken, I don’t know if they were models, or of they were a genuine couple preparing to get married.  Either way, it was a stroke of luck getting this shot from across the lake, given it had been raining off and on with breaks in the clouds allowing the sun to shine.  I plan to go back sometime in the next year, if all goes well, if not, then the year after.  There is so much more of Japan to see!

BTW, I wrote a small photo book that you can buy on Blurb.com!